


Copernican Revolt

by GoldenThreads



Series: Copernican Revolt [1]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Comes Back Wrong, Deaf Character, Family Feels, Fix-It of Sorts, Illustrated, Kid Fic, Multi, Returning Home, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Team as Family, Utopia (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:50:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 63,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16070099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: Determined to reclaim her soul at any cost, Illyana discarded countless timelines before discovering an outlier: a timeline where the fractured New Mutants had reunited around an orphaned lab experiment and raised him as their own. The perfect weapon ready and waiting for her.But the boy wouldn't stay orphaned for long. With the chessboard in disarray, the coffins all unlocked, and Warlock and Kitty back on Earth for the first time in years, the New Mutants are out of their depth. It's a feeling they're used to.Jono is just bloody fucking tired of X-Men.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheStemCell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheStemCell/gifts).



> Zombie Dad: A Big Gay New Mutant Family Adventure, about finding your way in from the cold and refusing to make do after that. Opens on Necrosha, and it all goes downhill from there...
> 
> Leeland on loan from [my very own selfsoulfriend.](http://stem-cell.tumblr.com/)

**[You have a mission, Cypher.]**

Sand. A memory of it squishing between his toes as he ran along the shore. He could not feel it now. Boots. Soggy. Weighted down to the seafloor. He had no choice of wardrobe, no voice to tell them black is not optimal for true stealth. He slogged onward. Step, step, step, through the sandy path to Utopia’s deepest moorings. He had walked this path before, mapping defenses so Selene could create her battle plans. He did not breathe, and so he could not complain at the heaviness of the water in his chest.

**[Get closer.]**

The New Mutants had congregated in their own housing wing to better cultivate their team spirit. The placement, however, had always troubled him. Other teams and looser friend networks appeared to occupy similar arrangements, and all were located in the upper levels where the facilities were more easily accessible and designed for regular occupancy. The New Mutants had cobbled rooms out of laboratories and storage, tucked down in the belly of the island where the science and tech teams worked. 

Why would they opt for noise and danger? The dormitory system on the upper levels possessed plenty of room. Despite its size, the island could easily accommodate twice its population. His first hypothesis had been defensive, based on the layers of volcanic buildup near the windows of Amara’s room, but the fortifications spread no further and easily broke apart at the touch. A spontaneous amalgamation based on proximity. He ran his gloved hand along the pillow lava at the base of her window now, glancing in. Lights out. Either they were out on a mission, or they slept.

A drainage pipe led him inside, and the computer system let him in like an old friend before forgetting him just as quickly. Boots, soggy. He slipped them off to muffle his steps, toes squishing in wet socks. He had entered Utopia before, though never this section. Selene did not care why the New Mutants opted for squalor beneath the sea. He did. He had to know.

**[Observe.]**

His second hypothesis was secretive. The New Mutants hid something here, but what had they to hide? He counted lab rooms as he slipped through the halls, confirming how many distinct hazardous systems they would need to corrupt. Simple to accomplish, yet any missed failsafe could weaken their plan of attack. The mission must go perfectly. If he could not read a path through their chaos, then his use as an asset was minimal. 

Four rooms. Three. 

Something was wrong. A gap in the blueprints, a room that should be there and was not. He ran his hand over the wall, tracing electrical patterns until he found a control box, but even there the room did not exist. It was completely separate from the rest of the Utopia system. It did not even link to the emergency power system, as secret experiment holdings usually did. What were they storing? 

What it did connect to was the ventilation system. Once he located the vents, he quickly mapped their flow and located the connection point. The only entrance to the secret room was through a common room connected to the New Mutants system, but the system could only be entered through a locked laboratory. Bizarre. The door outside had a whiteboard of crude drawings and a small mail slot for additional correspondence. He touched his fingers against the cool of the white panel, chest heavy, then turned to the electronic lock. Some keys were more worn down than others, and it was simple ~~—first airdate of Magnum, P.I.—~~ to determine the code from those hints. 

It let him in too easily. The common room was abandoned, movie-watching paraphernalia strewn about the floor. They had been pulled away on a mission in the middle of a team bonding exercise. Still, no reason to be careless. He turned off the still-running TV. No reason to be wasteful, either. 

The door was at the end of the hall, past Dani’s room, past Roberto’s room, past Xi’an’s room and Sam’s room. The handle was lower than the others. No light. 

He opened the door.

**[Don’t be seen.]**

Two golden eyes popped open in the darkness.

He froze, then jerked further into the room. His feet moved without him. Plush rug squishing beneath his wet socks. Step, step, step. He had never come this way before. Pillow lava outside the windows, protective, warm within the rock. Connected. Disconnected. Proximity. Secrets.

The lights turned on without a switch, without a clap or sign. A little blond child stood in a toddler’s crib, one hand bracing himself against the wooden barrier while the other pressed the ear of a stuffed rabbit into his mouth. He smiled. He wiggled on his small feet. [He reached out.](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZOgKK19T4KcH49c9Gszhmh5-0Z06pHIw) He touched the stranger’s cold cheek.

**[Return to me and report your findings.]**

…

…

…

Mission failed.


	2. Chapter 2

Six years earlier, the X-Men ran a routine raid on a research lab suspected of mutant experiments. One section of the lab had been quarantined with such security that only Logan dared step inside without a hazmat suit. Yet instead of finding toxic or radioactive samples, he discovered long sheets of golden lace isolated between panes of hermetically sealed glass, sub-zero storage vats, and pinpricks of ink thrashing violently under microscope slides. The cryogenically frozen storage jars revealed 50 small tubes of material, from small motes of gold to larger beans in mottled reds and pinks and greys. The first 41 were marked in the red of failure; the last 8 were empty. 

Ororo recognized the golden lace the moment she saw it, heart leaping in her chest. Technarch. Cameron Hodge hadn’t been the only one trying to recreate Warlock’s abilities after all, and somehow these scientists had acquired enough of him to begin the research anew. The X-Men moved the cryo-jars to storage and there the materials remained, all but forgotten until the Phalanx incursion reminded them what such experimentation invariably led to.

During a storage inventory following the invasion damage, the cryo-jars were rediscovered and moved to stronger security. Much stronger. They called in Moira and her shiny new assistant to evaluate the storage stability and dispose of them safely if possible. Even Douglock agreed that the fewer samples in existence, the better. He prepared microscope slides for Moira’s investigation, then retreated to the computer to piece through the records that had been taken alongside the cryo-jars.

_“Moira!”_

Douglock shouted for her attention, his eyes glued to the computer screen even as his hands remained fused to the keyboard. Frozen in place, something trembling deep inside him. “Moira!” he yelled again, voice scratchy with disbelief and anguish in equal measure. 

“You don’t need t’yell, Dougie.” She put down the slides and walked over to join him, and when he looked up she swore there were tears in his eyes. “What in God’s name did you find, love?”

“They took him,” he blurted. His gaze made her wish for a hivemind herself; she could see the thoughts buzzing about in that quick brain of his. “There’s a sample harvest log detailing how they processed the body and—“

Moira pulled his head against her chest, stroking his stiff hair and trying to calm him. She should’ve known better than to let him read echoes of the way he was created, culled from the dead and the stars alike. “Shhh, shhh, it’s okay love.”

“No, Moira, you don’t get it! They processed a _body_.” He finally unlaced his fingers from the keyboard, settling them firmly on the tabletop as he stood up. “Warlock didn’t leave a body.”

Her mouth opened without any sound to join it.

Douglock raised his face, defiant and utterly human. “But Doug did.”

  


* * *

  


When the team finally crawled back to Utopia, the sun was already inching into the eastern sky, blinding their tired eyes with the first rays of morning. Even Roberto flinched at the light, burying his face against Sam’s shoulder as they slogged towards the complex doors. In the old days, they could collapse in bed still covered in mud and monster slime. Nowadays they had to decontaminate in the showers first. Something about responsibility and parenthood and shit. He wanted to sleep.

“Coffeeeeeee,” Roberto groaned, stripping off his shirt and stepping under the shower spray with his pants still melded to his legs. “Sleeeeeeeeep.”

“Don’t think those go together.” Sam gave him a gentle push and watched as he plastered himself against the wall dramatically. “But I’ve got a solution if it’s coffee you’re itchin’ for.”

“Large cup of civet, as lightly roasted as your pasty farmboy skin, sweetened by the finest monk fruit this side of the Pacific, and don’t forget the gold leaf rim.”

Sam cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Berto volunteered for babysitting.”

“No takebacks!” came an answering shout from the other side of the locker room. He couldn’t say for certain, and she’d deny it if asked, but Sam would swear to God it was Illyana yelling. 

“Sam. _Sam._ What the _fuck_ my dude, I thought you were my bro.” Roberto clapped a hand over his heart in despair.

Laughing, Sam tossed him a bottle of anti-alien-spore body wash. “Well you always tell us DJ’s your favorite lil caffeine fix, so ain’t it a perfect match?”

Despite his groans, Roberto started scrubbing down more enthusiastically. No one had ever forgiven him for the time DJ caught the sniffles at eight months, and though he still claimed innocence of that unholy crime, like hell was he getting a second strike in his germ-passing conviction. He’d soap down until those beautiful pecs shone, goddammit.

He could hear Sam snoring by the time he finally made it back to their Secret Luxury Bunker™. The girls had collapsed in a pile on the couch. Even Illyana had slumped into a nearby chair, pretending to meditate her exhaustion away from behind miserable half-lidded eyes. 

Roberto tiptoed down the hall, more for his own sake than DJ’s. All the noise in the world wouldn’t wake him, but clomping around while the little tyke snoozed always made Roberto feel like the worst kind of bumbling frat boy. He was an upstanding father, okay? (Uncle, whatever.) He even knocked gently on the door before heading inside. While DJ couldn’t sign from behind a door, his hivemind was sophisticated enough for him to feel his family slowly approach and send them YES or NO to opening the door. Xi’an had given them all a very long lecture on cultivating agency in infants. Roberto could give an even longer one on cultivating spoiled brats, but he would spoil DJ come hell or high water, so that lecture wouldn’t have been in his best interest anyway.

He turned the dimmer switch on just far enough for DJ to be able to see his hands. Even though he kid needed another few hours of sleep yet, The Routine came first. They always checked in whenever they got home from a mission. Roberto crouched down by the bed, giving the blanket pile a firm shake. 

His hand went straight down to the mattress.

_Again._

“Computer,” Roberto groaned, rubbing at his face with both hands. “Put out an island-wide alert. We’ve lost the toddler.”

As the beeping began, he heard the frustrated wails of his teammates back in the den. Yeah. He felt that in his bones. Parenthood, huh?

They had lost their teleporting toddler so many times since he discovered his powers that there was now an official response team. Megan turned up immediately, armed with sweets and glow sticks, then popped off to do her sweep of all of their smallest offender’s favorite hiding spots. Tabby texted over to check in just as quickly. Most team leaders had a designated section of Utopia to check, though no one ever rooted him out quite so quickly as Megan and Tabby. Still, most people had stumbled upon him now and then – Piotr once sheepishly covered a Colossus-sized impression in the library floor with a new rug and kept it a secret for nearly three weeks. All he’d ever admitted to was almost tripping over a “mouse.”

The most frustrating part was that this should have been easy. No compound in the world had higher security or a more terrifying sentient alien program monitoring the frankly over-intrusive system. Yet time after time, they lost him in the vents or the closets or the books. They couldn’t call out to him. They couldn’t reliably spot him with technology, his Technarch biology either interfering externally or too irregular internally. If you could train a 2-year-old into a ninja, they’d have the perfect candidate. 

Roberto swept through his sector with practiced ease, going through every nook and cranny in the same order as always. No giggling brats or secret stashes of Amara’s imported chocolates. He’d never been the one to find DJ, so it wasn’t a surprise. 

What was a surprise was tripping over his own feet as he headed back into the hall. Roberto caught himself just in time to avoid flying face-first into the metal flooring, but not in time to avoid making an undignified squawk as he fumbled the step. He glowered back at the offending floor and the boots lying right there in the middle of the hallway. Students, always leaving their shit around instead of cleaning up like—why were the boots wet?

“New Mutants assemble!” he shouted, racing down the hall towards their quarters. He nimbly spun around Danger as she came stalking from the opposite direction, and threw up a quick thanks for all that childhood ballet training. “We have a serious problem!”

“More serious than you know,” Danger announced coldly. 

Xi’an stood there in the middle of their living room, arms wrapped around herself. “Copernicus is missing,” she said. “He never wakes the rabbit until breakfast but he’s gone and the diaper bag is missing and—“

Roberto brandished the soggy boots in the air. “Someone was here. They came in through the sewers—“

“—And the security system let them right in,” Danger finished. “They took the little one.”

Amara collapsed back into her seat, embers nipping at the edges of her hair as she swallowed down her anguish. “Explain.”

Danger’s fingers curled into a fist at her side while she used her other hand to bring up a holographic camera feed. “I reviewed the tape. It shows nothing. A void of nothing.” A flick of her wrist, and the empty space outlined itself. “They did not cut in a segment of empty feed. They merely asked the camera nicely, and it cropped them out.”

“So our security system is some glorified Photoshop, awesome, really setting the bar high here.” Roberto crossed his arms tight over his chest. He tried to give Illyana a Look, as if commanding her to get scary and back him up, but nothing could distract her focus from Danger’s explanation.

With a scowl, Danger continued. “The system is not sentient. It cannot make decisions. It merely obeys my commands. Yet this individual—“ They watched as the person-shaped outline made its way through the halls, weaving towards the baby’s room. “—asked, and it answered as if they were old friends.”

Sam cleared his throat. “Now, excuse me if this is impolite ma’am…do computers _have_ friends?“

“No. What they have are Programmers.” 

“Ain’t _you_ the programmer?”

Danger stared fixedly at the image’s outline, and little by little the image began to reconstitute itself. Black clothes, simple and nameless. A mess of yellow hair. “Even I was young once,” she answered in a low voice. 

They watched the stranger slip through their quarters and head straight for DJ’s room, then pause at the door as if they did not know what they would find. How did they know where to look if they didn’t know what they were after? There was no feed within the room since DJ had to be isolated from the main power systems lest he play with them and nibble on the electricity for fun. 

By the time the door reopened on the feed, the stranger’s image had been fully restored. They held DJ in their arms like a treasure, not a test subject, but it did nothing to allay the team’s fears. Everyone sat there in cold, nervous silence, their eyes fixed to an image they never expected to see. DJ turned to smile up at the stranger, brushing hair away from a familiar face, just as the stranger ducked down to press a kiss against the toddler’s forehead. And then they were gone. Vanished into the dawn.

_“Ai meu Deus,”_ Berto said into the silence. “Doug stole Doug Junior.”

Dani gave him a rough shove, nearly pushing him from his perch on the arm of the couch. “His name is _Leeland._ ”

  


* * *

  


Desperate times led to desperate measures, as the saying went. Dr. Hank McCoy had done everything within his power to solve the x-gene crisis, to revitalize the depowered and respark the potential for mutation in future generations. He had worked with the devil’s right hand, flirted with every scientific evil, and had nothing to show for any of it. No more mutants.

But he did have a cryo-jar with one lonely vial of viable cells, a promise to the dead and a hope for the future. 

Viable didn’t mean successful, however. Hank spent months secluded in the sterile environment of his lab, watching a little pink bean gestate within its nutrient tank. For a while it appeared to be a normal humanoid mutant, purely of Earth and bearing functional X-gene markers. Then he woke in the middle of the night to screaming alarms. The tank had cracked, and golden stardust danced through the surrounding liquid as if a herd of wild sea-monkeys. Hank managed to stabilize the tank, and from then on, for every bit of flesh that grew into recognizable shape, there was a matching tendril of black and gold ink trailing off towards the tank walls.

He furiously studied Moira and Douglock’s notes again and again; the Technarchs had never been his specialty. Their research papers mentioned something Douglock had done to the embryo, some process started but never completed, and all he could do was hope it had been enough. He couldn’t let 42 meet the same fate as the previous 41 projects; if he lost this child, he wouldn’t only lose the last hope for a mutant child – he would lose himself to guilt.

By the time the child reached five months, it was out of Hank’s hands. Vitals were solid. Visuals were frankly terrifying. The nutrient bath fed the human half, and a light electrical charge fed the alien half. Every evening after dinner, he sat next to the tank and read Ferdinand the Bull for the child’s bedtime story. It had always reminded him of Warlock in a way, preferring the flowers to the fighting, which made it perfect for the alien’s son. It was only later that he discovered the child he’d read aloud to for so many hours couldn’t hear him, regardless of age and development.

At eight and a half months, the ink tendrils curled around the infant’s limbs and seeped back into his skin. He was big and healthy and strong, ready to be born. And if the little one was ready, then Hank could make no more excuses.

The New Mutants were _furious._

Once Hank broke the news, he hightailed it out of the lab on some convoluted excuse and left them standing around the incubation vat. Dani’s hands shook in fury, Xi’an sat down on the table to peer in at the contained infant, and Sam couldn’t stop pacing angry circles around the lab.

It was Amara who broke the silence. “This is wrong.”

Roberto threw up his arms, gesturing at the entire lab. “Damn right, I was going to—“

“I wanted to—“

Sam and Roberto whirled to stare at each other, mouths hanging ajar with everything they’d left unspoken. An intense look passed between them and forged a quiet oath not soon to be broken.

“Okay, so while those two are off in their little fantasy of coparenting Doug’s son…” Dani stepped closer to the tank and laid her hand against the glass. This was the first time she’d been back with the team since losing her powers, and the glut of emotion in the air was palpable, this child the tangible manifestation of all their ruined hopes. “…what do we _do?”_

“He’s ours,” Xi’an answered. She never used her Big Sister voice on them, but they all recognized it now. “And New Mutants take care of their own. Always have, always will.”

“He _isn’t_ ours, and he isn’t Hank’s! This is Warlock’s—“

“Amara.” Dani caught herself as soon as she snapped, swallowing the rest of her frustration with a sigh. “…I agree with you. I know we all…thought about it, sometimes, but you’re right. He’s not ours. And we didn’t make this choice, all we can do is live with it. Isn’t he worth that?”

Amara looked away, casting a sidelong glance at the tank. “…he is.”

“So again, what do we do?”

“He needs a name,” Sam pointed out as he tuned back in. “He ain’t a science project, he’s our nephew. So we give him a name, and we get him out of that tank, and we raise him right.”

It sounded so simple when Sam said it, but even naming him proved a greater struggle than expected. Their initial ideas didn’t fit the boy in the tank at all, and the frustration was gnawing at all of them. Dani gave everyone two days to come up with a list; it was the wrong call. 

Roberto’s list read like a wild and crazy ride through his IMDB “A Man’s Man” personal celebrity list, with a characteristic focus on Tom Selleck and every role he’d ever played. He pitched each option with a businessman’s expertise. There was a PowerPoint. He’d printed business cards bearing his top three name choices to set the child up for success. Web domains had been purchased.

Sam passed around his list with a nervous earnestness. More well-researched than any term paper he’d ever submitted in his life, it detailed authors and illustrators and characters from every sci-fi and fantasy story he could remember Doug ever mentioning. There was Elvish. Dani couldn’t look him in his big nerdy face.

Amara abstained. “Unless you want a piece of paper with Gaius written twenty times, I’ve got nothing.”

Xi’an, however, had made the greatest mistake of all. When she saw how excitedly her brother and sister tried to think of names, she let the other students in the library in on the name quest. Soon the crowdsourcing effort had spread across the entire school. There was not only an official voting bracket, but a betting pool. She passed the list across the table to Dani in dead silence.

Dani picked it up with equal seriousness, read “Hippopotamus Rex Ramsey,” and folded it up once more before passing it to Amara for immediate incineration.

“…Right. There’s only one solution.” Dani took a deep breath, steeling herself for what came next. She hadn’t wanted to do this, not under these circumstances. “I’m calling Rahne.”

They hadn’t spoken since their falling out a year earlier, before the whole world went to hell. But Rahne was closer to Warlock than anyone, and Dani knew that she had visited the cryo-jar with Douglock more than once. With Doug and Warlock gone, with Moira gone, the only one in the whole world who should’ve made this choice was Rahne. Hurt feelings aside, Dani couldn’t let this go down without her.

What hurt worst of all was hearing Rahne crying on the other end of the line and not being able to reach out and comfort her in person.

“Leeland,” Rahne finally offered, after a long and exhausting conversation. “His name should be Leeland.”

“Okay.” Dani wrote it down on her notepad, looping the e’s, getting a feel for it.

“And…tell Dr. McCoy I’ll be there tomorrow. I have something he can’t do without.”

“We’ll wait.” She clutched the phone against her ear. “I promise.”

It was a promise none of them were willing to break. The New Mutants dutifully carried their bedding into the lab, setting up sleeping bags around the central nutrient bath. It glowed softly from its electric charge, and they all lay back and gazed up at it in anxious wonder.

Xi’an kept touching the cool surface as though transfixed, but every time she reached out to try and touch the child’s thoughts, she came up empty. It wasn’t the slippery ice of Warlock’s mindscape. Whatever she found there was too foreign and unfinished to measure. She kept trying.

“Hank said he’s deaf,” Sam mumbled into the quiet hum of the lab. He wasn’t sure who was still awake and wagered they all were grasping at the same loose ends. “Doug would’ve known sign language, but…”

“They have hearing aids.” Roberto crossed his arms behind his head. “My mom’s friend has them. But like, an adult choosing them is different from…this.”

Amara shuddered, wringing her hands in her lap where no one could see. “They grew him in a lab. We can’t simply…implant things in him. Then we’d be no different. He’ll be who he is.”

“Can I add how much I love you all?” Xi’an gave a shaky, relieved laugh. “Dani and I have been preparing arguments all afternoon for what we’d say if anyone was going to fight us on that front.”

“I’ll make a pamphlet, we can throw it at anyone who starts shit.”

“Here’s my son, check his brochure,” Dani mumbled in her best Roberto impression, and Amara choked back a laugh.

Roberto yawned, taking it in stride. “You realize we’re gonna be the reverse Guthries.”

“Aw hell.” Now it was Sam chuckling and throwing an arm over his face. “Hi I’m Leeland and these are my five parents. Six. Seven. They keep poppin’ out ma’am, I don’t know what to tell ya."

When the laughter subsided, they fell into a more comfortable silence than they’d felt all day. They could do this. It would be an all-around mess, but they knew how to make a sleepover out of any situation by now. 

“So, raise your hand if you’re up for learning sign language.” Xi’an’s voice rang clear in the quiet lab, the only answer heard in the shuffle of arms from their blanket cocoons. She sat up briefly to count, then lay back down with a smile. “That’s more hands than New Mutants. Nice enthusiasm, team.”

“Who raised their hand twice?”

“I mean we do have two of them, Sam.”

A pillow careened into Roberto’s face, and only a terrifying glimpse of Dani’s disapproving face in the eerie light kept him from starting a full-on pillow fight around the fetus jar. He was an uncle now. He had to be responsible and keep his lust for pillow vengeance restrained until later. 

They didn’t sleep.

  


The morning’s reunion with Rahne passed without notice; it was as if she had arrived late for a team meeting and assumed the spot always saved for her, always waiting. Dani squeezed her shoulder, Rahne offered a tentative smile, and everything else was shelved in favor of the matter at hand. It was only when Hank burst in with a bluster of eager welcome that everyone’s anxiety finally boiled over.

“Rahne! Excellent to see you, I’m so glad you could—“

The slap rang out across the room, silencing them all besides a quiet _oh shit_ from Roberto. Hank reached up to touch his cheek in dumbfounded awe. 

“You had no right. Pretending ‘Lock’s dead ‘n gone so you can do whatever you want with his son. He left us his future ‘cause he trusted us, and you made liars of us all.” Rahne’s nails bit into her fists at her sides – her real nails, wolfish and wild. “You can’t even imagine the damage you’ve done.”

“…I know,” Hank said softly, glancing around the room at them all. “I take full responsibility for my actions, but I cannot undo them now. All I can do is step back and let his family make it right.”

Rahne gave him a long look, and this time he didn’t flinch away from her stony gaze. “…right. Well, I brought someone you’re going to need. Trying this without a specialist, out of your damn mind…”

Hank scratched his scruffy chin. “A specialist? But all transmode carriers are off-world, or out-timeline, to my knowledge. I checked twice.”

“Your knowledge, like your conscience these days, was wrong.” She turned and gave a whistle.

And in walked a little monkey on a leash.

Its handler poked her head in through the doorway a moment later, pushing her sunglasses up into her mess of ruddy hair. “Yo, heard you need a midwife.”

Rahne gave a sarcastic flourish of her hand, though she and the other woman shared a warm look. “May I introduce Miss Esperanza Ling.” 

“The one, the only.”

Hank reached out for a handshake and put on his best smile. “My apologies, miss, but I’ve never heard of—“

Esperanza breezed past him. “Yeah, there’s a reason for that.” She strolled through the lab until she located the nutrient vat and its snoozing resident. It sat on a long, flat table of industrial steel, and she nodded to herself before laying her hands flat on its surface. Instantly, the table’s edges sprung upwards until it was shaped more like a shallow bath, and then the color began to leech out, a cloudy crystal spreading from Esperanza’s palms. She spent a few minutes inspecting every angle while Hank stared on in utter shock. 

“That should do,” she said at last. “Purely inorganic, not contaminated by any manufacturing solutions. He won’t be able to transmode it.”

While Hank immediately launched into an intense scientific interview of what Esperanza had done, an interview that quadrupled in intensity when she was able to answer in molecular detail, the monkey continued making its own rounds of the laboratory. He’d spent a while tugging at Rahne’s pant leg, waiting for his own introduction to the waiting audience, but when she finally noticed him all he got was a hug. So off he went to inspect the surroundings and the new people within. The New Mutants had formed a small peanut gallery along the far wall, unwilling to get between Rahne’s wrath and Hank’s shame, and though they sent him funny looks they were far more interested in his human.

Well, there was only one important person to introduce himself to anyway.

The monkey hopped up onto the table, the leash hanging loose around Esperanza’s wrist. He went right to the nutrient bath and knocked on the side, ignoring the panicked shouts of the useless humans around him, then gave his best grin hello.

The infant’s eyes slid open, and the room fell silent.

[ _Chi-Chee. You Leeland._ ]

[ _?_ ]

Chi-Chee didn’t speak like the humans did, he wasn’t a mutant or anything like that. But he was fluent in Leeland’s native language: hivemind. He sat down next to the vat and let his tail curl around the base, imitating the relaxed yoga poses he’d watched his humans twist themselves into. 

[ _You Leeland._ ] He didn’t know words, but he knew sounds – even if the infant didn’t. An impression of stardust. Leeland. 

The baby’s eyes opened wider, then clenched shut when they let in too much light. 

“What’s happening?” Sam whispered, unable to tear his eyes away from the strange sight before him.

Esperanza put her hands on her hips. “I said I brought a midwife. I never said it was me.”

[ _Leeland home._ ] Chi-Chee didn’t know these people, but his humans said they were friends, and he trusted his humans. So he looked around the room and thought of each of them in turn, wrapping them in feelings of warmth, of safety. Then he handed them to the infant, even though Leeland didn’t understand what was happening or how to hold what he’d been given. The feelings didn’t slip away into nothing, they only slipped from his memory and curled themselves into his virus instead. [ _Home. Family. Leeland family._ ]

His human had said the baby would be very, very scared. Chi-Chee couldn’t remember ever being that scared; his human had always been there with him. His home, his family, his safety. He didn’t want the baby to be that scared. He was trying his best.

[ _Leeland. Leeland._ ]

The infant’s eyes opened again. 

Chi-Chee put his little hand against the glass. 

[ _Leeland. Scary okay. Family here. Home. Safe._ ]

He felt a tiny, sluggish nudge against his mind. It wasn’t like his human’s love. It was raw and new and quiet. He nudged back just as softly, holding on.

[ _Not alone._ ]

The infant didn’t pull away. 

Chi-Chee turned and chirped at his human. They were ready.

Esperanza was the one to open the vat, covered hand-to-shoulder in her latest transmode-proofing. She knelt up on the table with her hands dipped into the nutrient bath, letting them reach the same temperature as the liquid before she finally touched the child within. They’d turned off the electrical charge, but the whole table sparked and sizzled the moment they touched. Esperanza didn’t flinch. She gently stroked the baby’s thin hair while Chi-Chee kept pushing strength and trust across their link. Techno-organic tendrils pooled around everything within the water, curling around her fingers and squeezing like miniature pythons. Esperanza didn’t flinch from them; he couldn’t hurt her, she wouldn’t hurt him, they were safe.

It took two long hours of gentle coaxing, of the tiny alien infant balking at the world outside his vat and trying to murder the intruder daring to disturb him. Esperanza accustomed him to touch, until the transmode calmed and sank back inside him; to movement, until he did no more than whimper and squirm as she stroked his limbs; and finally to the emptiness outside the water, where he screamed and screamed but kept the murder virus inside his tiny human-shaped body. She held him close to her chest, never breaking eye contact whenever he cracked his open to glower at the universe.

Finally, Chi-Chee gave his human a long-suffering screech and Esperanza laughed under her breath. She carried Leeland off of the table and kicked free a chair for her to collapse into. The moment she had him balanced in her lap, Chi-Chee raced up and curled around little Leeland, forming a soft puddle of exhausted monkey limbs. 

It was only then that Esperanza realized Dr. McCoy and the New Mutants had left. Rahne alone remained. She pulled up a chair and settled in next to Esperanza, a blanket laid across her lap for when Leeland could be safely moved. 

“Hey,” Esperanza whispered to her.

Rahne smiled at all three of them. “Thank you. I know this has been harder on you than you’ve let on.”

She hummed a vague agreement. Hard wasn’t the word. 

“…I miss him.”

Esperanza gazed back at the little one, finally asleep in her arms. She knew Rahne wasn’t talking about Doug. “You and me both. Now, ready to hold your nephew?”

It took Rahne a moment to put on the safety gloves that Esperanza had prepared for everyone. Everything was going smoothly, but there was no reason to be careless and it was important that no one approached Leeland with fear for the first few days. He needed to cement his association with everyone and safety, finalizing the kinship network that Chi-Chee had planted the seeds for.

Rahne started crying the moment Leeland was in her arms, then kicked futilely at Esperanza as she snapped a series of pictures on her phone. “Stop, _stop._ Just…will you grab something from my bag?”

Chi-Chee reached the bag first, pulling it across the floor to Rahne’s feet. He rummaged, rummaged, rummaged, and triumphantly raised a stuffed red rabbit into the air. 

The infant made a pitiful noise, and Rahne tucked the rabbit in against him before wrapping the blanket around him once more. Esperanza sent her a curious glance, but got no answer. Rahne wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“He’s beautiful,” she whispered, leaning down to press her lips against Leeland’s forehead.

  


* * *

  


The toddler at the back of the bus had been screaming nonstop for the past two hours. 

Few people took this bus north to Portland at mid-day, but those that did had had enough. Shanee tucked her headphones back into her purse and glanced over her shoulder. The young father and his two-year-old were sitting in the very back of the bus, and all the other passengers had long since migrated to the very front. Everyone had cooed over the perfectly-behaved child at the first rest stop, when he dragged his stuffed rabbit around to meet everyone, but as soon as it hit lunchtime all bets were off. 

The father glanced up when Shanee slid into the seat in front of them. He’d been holding on to his son for over an hour, jostling him gently even as the child screamed murder against his chest. He had the look of a man who hadn’t had a good night of sleep in years and didn’t expect one until the kid turned eighteen. 

“First kid?” she asked, folding her arms on top of the seat back. “He’s got some lungs on him.”

He watched her for a moment, tracing the shape of her lips as she spoke, then rummaged in the diaper bag for a pencil and notebook. He wrote an answer in a smooth, looping hand. 

**I’m sorry. He’s deaf so he can’t hear himself.**

Shanee gave a slow nod. “Ouch. But, uh, you…can, right?”

**Yes.** He underlined the apology from before. **He is. Loud.**

“Very, very loud. You checked his diaper right? I don’t want to like, step on your toes, but you look overwhelmed and I’ve practically raised my nieces.”

**No offense taken. Diaper is fine. He has a strict schedule. Doesn’t like change.**

“Ahhh, that makes sense. Travel must be a bitch.”

The man circled his **Yes** multiple times.

“Well, chin up dude. He’ll tire out eventually.” Shanee gave him a salute and hightailed it back to the front of the bus. Just another dad having to watch his kid for the first time without the mom around, lord. Hopefully fewer people would be caught in the crossfire the next time he tried for a day trip with junior.

  


* * *

  


At ten past noon, Magneto returned the half-size tray to the cafeteria wash bins and made his way down into the belly of the labs. There were always unexpected delays and disasters in their line of work – well, life – but he had come to expect a certain level of respectful communication. When the New Mutants were off-island, one of the other youths brought Leeland to his daily lunch appointment. Sometimes he would bring himself if they were taking too long. Today, however, there had been no word and no frustrated teleportation. 

He passed one of Danger’s auxiliary drones elbows-deep in electronics in the hall and paid no mind. It wasn’t until he found the laboratory doors ajar that he knew something was wrong. Half of the New Mutants were gathered around a map on the kitchen table with a few other mutants pouring over security feeds on their laptops nearby. They worked in a frantic hum of near-silence, broken only when he rapped on the doorframe and let himself into their quarters. His old students jolted to attention as if he were yet again their headmaster, conducting a sudden bed-check for tidiness.

“Leeland’s gone,” Roberto blurted, just as he had once panicked and admitted to all the Playboy magazines hidden under his bed. He had lost his youthful charm and chill, instead looking very near to hurling himself out a window and flying into the sun for a pick-me-up. Before he could say anything else, he pulled his computer up onto his knees to hide behind the screen and break eye contact.

Magneto said not a word. He merely loomed there in the doorway, half overbearing headmaster and half exhausted grandfather, and waited for them to come clean.

The longer he waited, the more he knew something was very, very wrong.

In the end it was Sam who broke the silence. He came in from his bedroom, slamming the door behind him as he clenched his phone in his hand. “Scott says mutant graves all across the damn nation have been vandalized. He’s been ‘monitoring the situation’ and thanked me for the update.” It was only then that he noticed Magneto standing across the room.

After a moment Magneto laid his helmet on the table aside the coatrack and went into the kitchen to inspect their map. It showed Utopia and different routes around the exterior, each marked in a different color with a different timestamp. He looked back at Sam, shaking in his angry boots, then to Dani at the head of the table. “Danielle, if you would.”

“Early this morning an…intruder infiltrated Utopia and abducted Leeland. We’re tracking his movements. He’s visited at least five times, always arriving around this area on the shore before vanishing from the same point. Danger is still working to restore the video footage that he altered. There may be more of…them, or more visits.”

She couldn’t say the name. None of them could. But there was no question who they were referring to; no one else could cause such desperate shame and fear all at once.

“Samuel, how long ago was the grave hit?”

Sam’s hands still shook in rage at his side, but the cold strategic tenor of Magneto’s question helped him keep his clarity. “Two months.”

Every head in the room turned to stare at him. Two months ago their teammate’s grave was defiled, his remains stolen, and no one had bothered to mention it. From the rigid set of Magneto’s jaw, he was thinking much the same. 

“Show me the footage.”

They offered him a chair, and he sat down to watch the restored videos on the screen that Illyana was analyzing. She radiated the same tangible, nameless frustration at a miracle warped beyond saving; the same kind of miracle that brought her back, that brought Leeland to them, that brought Magneto a small lunchtime companion in his final years. 

The first video was from six days earlier. Though it took place entirely underwater, the sight of that distant figure and its set shoulders still stopped the breath in Magneto’s lungs. There was no mistaking him; Magneto had watched that boy choose every footfall as he picked his way around the edges of a simulated battlefield, and the distant figure took the same care now as he circled the ocean floor fortifications then returned to his origin point and disappeared.

In the second video he approached far closer, inspecting individual structures and testing the security protocols at each access point. At one of them, his entire face filled the screen for a precious moment while he conversed with the technology. Golden circuitry pulsed around his dark eyes, his pale face solemn and unmoving. 

The third and fourth videos were full of more detailed analysis of their defenses. The fifth began the same way, but then he tarried by the lava formations outside Amara’s window.

“There,” Magneto said and reached out to pause the video. The others had startled at the suddenness of his voice, and they crowded around desperate for new clues. “That’s the moment Douglas stopped investigating for someone else.” It was the same way he had performed his schoolwork, a solemn diligence until the moment his own curiosity was piqued. 

They watched yet again as Doug slipped inside and made his way to Leeland’s room, to the kiss he pressed against his son’s hair.

“If that’s true, then he didn’t come here for Leeland.” Dani glanced at the map yet again. “But someone’s planning an attack. Sam, how many graves did Scott say were disturbed?”

“…Hundreds across North America. And.” He swallowed hard. “More in Genosha.”

“They’re planning a _war,”_ Magneto corrected coldly. The hair stood on the back of his neck, but it wasn’t at the thought of Genosha’s horrors or a new threat on their doorstep; those he lived with every minute of his life. No, all that could shake him now was the thought of his youngest grandson out there alone with all the world’s evils reaching towards him. They wouldn’t allow Doug’s betrayal to go unremarked.

Utopia would be attacked. Douglas and Leeland would be attacked. They couldn’t afford to waste resources tracking one toddler when their entire population was at risk. Out of the corner of his eye, Magneto could still see Doug pressing that kiss against his son’s hair. 

Once upon a time, a bright-eyed and untested boy told him that saving many over saving one wasn’t a victory – you had to save them all, you had to try. He had watched all his former students grow into adults he barely recognized, but the young man in the video wore death like a new suit, the same clever child called to a game beyond his years. Doug had set something in motion the moment he followed his curiosity over his orders, and Magneto had to trust his instinct.

“And when they strike, we’ll be ready for them.”


	3. Chapter 3

Forewarned was forearmed. 

When the army slipped into Utopia under cover of darkness, the doors locked behind them and a new hell unfurled in place of the anticipated slaughter. The walls closed in, a labyrinth blooming from the joints in the floor panels, the island itself coming alive to cage the horrors unleashed upon it. As the soldiers reached out with panic-broken code, a siren song of sleep seeped into their tired veins as Danger’s lullaby struck them down. 

Illyana gave them their final rites. Cell by cell, she brought the sweet kiss of oblivion with her soulsword. Those controlled the longest fought tooth and nail, summoning all their powers, screaming against their fate and the cold-eyed Atropos come to trim the thread of their lives once more. It was the recent additions to the army that shook Illyana’s nerve. 

Jay, asking for his brother.

Banshee, begging them to keep his daughter away, carving his last words into the wall with a final scream.

Skin, taking Synch’s hand and squeezing tight.

Tarot watched with quiet acceptance as Illyana culled her fellow Hellions, running Roulette through with an enthusiasm bordering on glee. When Illyana turned to finish the set, Tarot held up her hands in a peaceful gesture.

“Please wait.”

Illyana drew near, her sword lowered only an inch.

“He got away. Did he go to you?” Tarot asked. The longer she conversed, the more the circuitry bled an angry red through her skin. She ignored it, standing tall and unafraid. 

“No.”

“I see.” She looked down and shuffled her deck, over and over, buying time against the dark. “I have something for you. I did not understand it. Perhaps you will.”

Tarot drew a single card and offered it to Illyana. The Ace of Pentacles. 

Illyana didn’t move.

“I have been dead before,” Tarot whispered in the space between them, still holding the card. “I have lived and died more than my share. The thread breaks, then knots and spins anew, changed and unchanged. You are like me. But you will go on and I will not. I do not envy you this.”

“Stop talking.”

She smiled, young and sad. “You hope he will be like you. You always do. You hope he will stay and do not dare to speak it, for all your hopes go the same way. The thread breaks.”

Illyana snatched the card from her hand like a drowning woman reaching for a lifeline. A hand offering the pentacle, so similar to the amulet that held the fragments of her soul. A hand from nowhere offering new hope. A promise she couldn’t believe in and all of it gold.

“I am ready to sleep now,” Tarot told her, smiled, and thought no more. 

  


* * *

  


The rabbit was the key. 

Nothing Doug tried could calm Leeland’s tantrums before they had run their course. Nothing could get him to eat what he didn’t want to eat. Nothing would make him communicate or walk or look or stay still or smile or anything else. But if Doug picked up the rabbit, Leeland would follow him with single-minded focus, as intense a look twisting his brows as any two-year-old could manage.

If Doug signed _rabbit,_ then Leeland would stop and give him the same look, waiting.

If Doug thought _rabbit,_ then Leeland would stop and give him the same look, but with energy nipping along his skin, a little spark of stardust dancing around his tiny sneakers. After that, all he needed to do was think of a location, and there they would reappear. 

A two-year-old could only manage so much, of course, but Doug tested the boundaries constantly. Every time they reached a new city, he mapped their surroundings for convenient port-points with access to further transport for escape. Transportation required cash, as did food and diapers. His pockets were heavy with change from all the vending machines he had befriended, ones tucked away with half-expired stock and no one to check their earnings. 

They hopped cities each night while Leeland slept. Doug tore and knotted an old jacket into a sling so Leeland could ride on his back, and he snoozed there peacefully as Doug struck out cross-country and walked until dawn. His virus corrected any weariness or damage. He kept walking. 

The lights of Seattle twinkled in the distance when he felt a sudden loosening in his chest, the malicious code disappearing in an instant, a puff of smoke swallowed by the breeze. 

He kept walking.

It was 4:39 am on an empty stretch of the West Valley Highway when he stopped walking and turned to face south. Silent. Still. 

Selene was dead. But somewhere out there, something worse had just arrived. His insides bucked, a tumult of squealing acid. Going north to Canada wouldn’t be enough. They needed protection. They needed something even more terrifying than the terror lurking out there in the dark.

He adjusted Leeland on his back and turned east.

He walked.

  


* * *

  


Illyana showed no one the card. She stashed it the bottom drawer of her dresser, the one marked with so many fake sigils that no one would dare touch it even if they had a mind to. Tarot’s words had been as insufferably vague as any soothsayer’s, which meant they had a similarly insufferable quantity of truth therein. If Illyana could only decipher them…she caught herself, shook her head. _Decipher._ No, too obvious, especially for him. Doug’s childhood self would have rolled his eyes at subpar wordplay. His adult self tended towards a severity so sharp it could cut the glass he set between himself and the world.

The card was new. Would he be new as well?

Ever since she returned to the New Mutants, scuttling into yet another universe, she’d felt as though everything were balanced on a knife’s edge. Her soul cracked open for the taking, and all of Limbo and its gods looming behind her. The fate of their entire race, driven onto this barren island. Kitty’s life, burning out somewhere beyond the stars, beyond her reach, beyond her broken hope. The much-lauded child named Hope, snatched away into the timestream. And Leeland, her little nephew who touched her face and smiled, even when she stood with horns and hooves and malice twisting her face.

Now the dead themselves had risen to rage against the living, and she had struck them all down by her own hands. Another novelty. Was she not their kin? A corpse driven only by rage and longing, sent to torture the living? She had turned her soulsword on herself when the job was done, yet its blade found nothing left to carve out of her. 

New hope. But which hope? She needed to be ready, to prepare every resource to bring about the promise dangled on that distant stick. Unless she could determine the direction it would all be for naught. If her soul slipped through her fingers again, so be it. But if it were Leeland, if it were _Kitty…_

No. Tarot’s card showed the mark of her soul gems, and though that could be misdirection, it still had to point to some clue she herself was missing. 

All her life, she had sat cross-legged on the floor to meditate and think. Now she found herself lying on her back to face the distant stars. She tossed a hand towards the ceiling and let a map of Limbo’s current battle lines fill the room. Lessons learned: Selene’s plot had failed, as it always did. The dead could be controlled by the transmode, at least temporarily, yet the transmode could not be controlled by her magic. Selene proved too foreign and clumsy at the reins, and the army had bucked her control even as it failed to fight off the virus. 

Years ago, Warlock and the Magus had wreaked havoc in Limbo by letting the transmode run rampant. It mixed with magic as if oil and water, coexisting only in pure separation and leaving its toxic residue in every strain of power in the land. If she could turn it on her usurpers, they would have no defenses: a fool’s logic. Everyone who weaponized the transmode was overcome by hubris in the end.

And yet…Leeland was not a weapon. Only a very small ally. 

If she unleashed it in Limbo, it would run its course and be ripe for Leeland’s snacking in a handful of years. He would not even need to visit to make the mess, she could simply hire him to clean it up later down the line. He could earn an allowance. That was fair, was it not?

All she needed was an active sample from the Selene strain, one primed for disobedience and already magically attuned. It may very well have been mutually assured destruction – Limbo was part of her own being, after all – but she was quickly running out of options as well as time. The war would culminate in only a few short months. If she wanted a sample on hand, then she needed to secure it now.

Laboratory security had been recalibrated after Leeland’s abduction. It still only took a quick trip by stepping disc for her to arrive in the specialized techno-organic storage lab, stirring the silence in a whirl of spellwork and— 

Broken glass.

Illyana drew her sword.

“Show yourself,” she called into the pitch black of the room. Her sword burst into a fitful glow as small bursts of white light floated around her to illuminate the area. Nothing. “You will meet your end by sword or by prize, Thief. The treasure you seek will devour you at a touch.”

Something was there, she could feel it now, a palpable wall of anger and bitterness and the sharp tang of devastation. It rose up higher and higher, smothering the heart of her. Lucky she didn’t have one.

Lightning struck the room as something sparked against her magic lights, and as Illyana whirled to catch sight of the intruder, they lashed out and knocked the soulsword from her hand with such force that she felt her finger crack from the strain. She lunged for the weapon only to take a blow to the side, a football tackle, but when the figure pinned her against the wall it wasn’t with two strong arms – it was with dozens of them.

_“What have you done?”_ hissed the abomination, black as the void she knew too well. It dragged her higher against the wall, her feet dangling limp. She didn’t fight. “You never learn! Playing with horrors even now, you _stupid_ humans, you—“

Illyana couldn’t free her hand, couldn’t reach out to touch the creature’s face, but a smile bled through her callous expression just the same, rivaling the malice in the maws glowering down at her. “You’re back,” she said, her voice so lost under the other’s angry tirade that she never heard how young and giddy she sounded. “You came back.”

“To this,” he choked out, one pair of arms thrown wide to gesture to the entirety of the laboratory. Phalanx and techno-organic samples were stored everywhere along the walls, and the tank that once held her growing nephew still sat in one corner. For the first time, Illyana saw it as he must: pieces of flesh hung up like trophies, a cryo-vat of dead infants, a triumphant display of all the carnage he’d spent his life trying to erase.

_To me,_ she thought suddenly. _You came back to me._ She didn’t need Leeland or a sample. She had the best weapon she could ever need, and this time there was no one else staying his hand.

“When we were young,” she whispered, not recognizing her own voice. “You thought I betrayed you. You raised your fists. And then you trusted me over your rage and fear.”

“We are not young.”

She grinned a coyote’s smile. “No. But you will trust me even now, Warlock.”

He dropped her. Though Warlock still loomed, his head sagged against the wall above her, all the anger draining out of him. Only the guilt and the devastation remained. “…Something is out there. It flees every time Self approaches. One: Selfsoulfriend’s gravesite disturbed. Two: Transmode signatures erratic worldwide. Many then none. Three: Self arrives here and discovers this. X-Men research. Query: What is Self to think?”

Illyana watched his sad eyes. “So much has changed. No one knew where you went and…Dr. McCoy made a mistake. They had to research the transmode to prevent a bigger one.”

“Scientists always—“ Warlock shook his head, frustrated and on the verge of tears, even if unable to cry them. _“Why?”_

Illyana chose her next words carefully, but her mouth blurted something completely different. “Because we’re raising your son.”

  


* * *

  


Busking was a hell of a lot harder when you were blue. A smoker’s aura of self-loathing and a scarf covering his mouth, that was fine, that was _hipster._ Plain old blue didn’t strike any such chord.

Jono had headed out west weeks ago with only a duffel, his tech, and a guitar from a second-hand shop. Usually it only took a few days to scrounge up enough for food and a bus ticket, but the blue seemed to have thrown a wrench in the works. He’d seen some other ex-mutants on the streets with sad stories scrawled on their cardboard signs. Whatever. He could live with blue most days; he’d had far worse. He’d made it as far as Denver, and it was only another few states until he hit the coast. The X-Men probably wouldn’t have anything for him, but he’d always heard San Francisco was a nice enough spot even for the blue.

Every morning at eleven, Jono found a nice spot in the shade alongside Sloan Lake and popped open his guitar case towards the footpaths. He started up with Mr. Tambourine, rolling on to Just Like Heaven by lunchtime. Most cities he managed to hit it off with a food truck or two, setting up nearby to lure them in with music alongside the delectable smells, but no one had seemed up for it this time around. In the evenings he dragged himself over to the Starbucks on the Boulevard and played some smooth original tunes to the less obliging crowd. 

He’d already been playing by the lake for a few hours when the boy appeared. Children often came over to stare at the blue man, and Jono always tried to get a smile out of them before their parents snatched them away. This one was younger than most, still wobbly on his little legs when he ran up to Jono too fast. He stood there sucking on the ear of his stuffed rabbit for a few minutes, utterly transfixed by Jono’s playing. Jono switched to a fun ditty about straw-blond hair and freckles in the sun, even leaving a blank in the song for the kid to add in his name, but he didn’t seem to understand. Too young, maybe.

Jono could spot the dad a few yards off, sitting on a bench and pretending to watch the lake while never letting the child out of his sight. Jono gave a wave, but got no response there either. Yeah, yeah, leave him to babysit, real nice. 

The boy ran away, but raced back over two songs later. He sat down on the pavement and settled his stuffed rabbit up against his knee like it was paying attention. Then he pulled out the two big sticks he’d gathered and started drumming along.

A laugh broke into the lyrics, and Jono had to stop a moment to remember his place. “Good rhythm there, Rabbit.” Not the beat he was going for, but you couldn’t teach genius. “Got a favorite song?”

The boy kept drumming.

“…Got a name?”

He glanced up, finally noticing that Jono had stopped playing. But his eyes went to Jono’s hands, not his face, and that’s when it clicked. 

_Hi,_ Jono signed, wracking his brain for the American version.

The little boy’s eyes lit up. _Hi!_

He couldn’t remember the bloody colonists’ fingerspelling, so names were out. _Music good?_

The little boy nodded enthusiastically, hiding his smile behind his hands. It was so infectious that Jono felt his joy firsthand, a foreign tickle of sheer happiness in the back of his head. Then he drummed a little more and stared at Jono expectantly.

“Alright, alright…”

There wasn’t much use in trying to play with a second beat, so Jono started playing around the rhythm the boy gave him. It was honestly more fun than he’d had on the streets in weeks, strumming up a silly song with the fakest country beat. Every now and then he paused to take a drink and roused his little drummer to make sure he watered up too.

On one break, Jono thought of a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Not a sudden rumble of the stomach he always forgot about or one of his cravings for taste, but a bright and crystal-clear image of white bread with the crust cut off, bright pink jam, and the creamiest of warm peanut butters. He closed his eyes and the image floated there even more urgently in his thoughts, and when he opened them again the little boy was pointing at the gourmet PB&J food truck parked down the path.

Fucking hell.

As if summoned from thin air by his son’s display of telepathy, the dad from the bench appeared before them. He looked like a Wall Street trader who’d let himself relax a little too much on vacation – a bit of peach fuzz on his chin, his hair too long for its styling – up until Jono glanced down and saw his rugged bare feet. Extended vacation, then, and on the run with his mutant son. Were they also headed west, chasing after Utopia?

Jono opened his mouth to reassure him, even if the blue might have done well enough on the mutant solidarity front, but the minute the man looked at Jono all fatherly fondness dropped away. A furious disgust replaced it, one Jono hadn’t seen directed at him since he had a gaping wound for a face. He wanted to scream and tell the man off. All the echoes of his own self-loathing stopped up his throat.

The man snatched up his son and backed away slowly, blue eyes fixed on Jono like a guard dog facing down a predator. Soon enough they slipped into the crowd and disappeared. Jono clutched his guitar and didn’t move from his spot on the ground. He hadn’t felt ice down his spine like this in a long time; his face was fine now, it wasn’t perfect and it was barely his but… He wouldn’t justify it with a scream, wouldn’t let his hands shake in fury or his mouth twist in anger. There’d been worse. He was fine. It was fine. He strummed a tune, the next song in his set. He had a job to do. He looked down at his strings, and only then did he realize two things.

First, the boy had forgotten his rabbit, still propped up as a little audience next to Jono’s guitar case.

Second, the man had left a faint trail of bloody footprints as he went.

  


* * *

  


Three hours out of Denver, Leeland stopped screaming and opted for hanging limp as spaghetti. He flopped his head this way and that, flailed his starfish limbs as Big Bee tried to change his clothing, then stubbornly peed on the floor instead of going potty. The man couldn’t look away for more than a second without Leeland disappearing to somewhere else in the house they were squatting in. Even a child could tell when his dad had lost all control over the situation.

By the time they turned east, Leeland had come to terms with the urgency of the situation. He wiggled listlessly in the sling on his Big Bee’s back, resting his cheek on the man’s shoulder and watching the passing cars with a glum pout twisting his lips. It was too early for travel, which meant too early for sleep. His eyes caught the light of every vehicle, shining gold at the drivers.

The fast cars made the wind whip past his cheeks, even from their path a few feet off the side of the road. The big ones were his favorite. They rumbled through him with a roar. A nice lady in a big, big, _big_ one had given them a lift a few nights before. Leeland liked that. He could feel the rumble, and Big Bee actually managed a little sleep for once. 

They were too far now for him to pop back to his rabbit, but a very big rumble could take them back in no time. Big Bee didn’t listen. He never did. Leeland buzzed and buzzed in the hive, and still all of Big Bee’s responses were a calm, collected _No._

Leeland wasn’t leaving Copernicus behind. 

He popped back a quarter mile down the road towards town. The road was very rocky where they had been walking, but much smoother up where the big cars were driving. Leeland crawled up onto the flat highway and started following the big white line. It was hard to see in the dark, even with his eyes glowing softly in the moonshine.

All the big cars were going the wrong way, heading farther away from Copernicus and the city. But the other side of the road had them all going back to the city. Leeland waited for the road to clear, just like Mama Shan taught him. Sometimes the city told the cars to stop and let the people go, all with lights! Leeland liked that part. There weren’t any lights here, but the cars were way off in the distance, so he started to cross.

He never heard the howl of the truck’s horn. He couldn’t.

He only saw the lights when they loomed over him like giant eyes, like a _siredam—_

Big Bee crashed into him, and Leeland ported them away in a terror, the truck’s breath hot on his cheeks. They reappeared a few yards to the side of the road, where the gravel gave way to a sharp bank. Leeland’s feet kicked once in midair and Uncle Kurt’s training kicked in – always port back to earth, don’t finish the port until your feet are on the ground. It was a lesson he’d practiced more than walking by the time he was 18 months old, and it saved him now as he popped down to the soft grass below. 

Big Bee wasn’t as lucky.

He dropped to the ground with a crack, slipping on the embankment and rolling down into the brush below. Leeland could feel himself screaming, knew it from the raw ache of his throat, and scrambled to try and find him among all the branches in the pitch black night. He reached out with his little hands and grasped at anything warm.

After what felt like hours, a heavy hand dropped onto Leeland’s head and threaded fingers through his hair. He burst into tears, following the hand to an arm and a chest and throwing himself against that warmth. The hive buzzed and screamed and ached, ached, ached.

His father pressed his nose against Leeland’s hair so the boy couldn’t see his face as he took stock. Leeland, after some careful prodding of the sobbing lump of a toddler, appeared perfectly fine. He would check again by daylight. His own body, however, was shattered by the impact and shredded by the fall. Ribs cracked, shoulder dislocated, his leg torn so badly he couldn’t move it, pain or no. He could feel blood trickling down his forehead and onto Leeland’s hair. He’d need a bath first thing in the morning. 

They couldn’t sign by moonlight, so he buzzed a safe warmth over the hivemind until Leeland finally dropped into an exhausted, fitful slumber. Only once he was out did the transmode start to pool in open wounds and slip between aching joints. 

No harm done.

  


* * *

  


In the morning, Jono dragged his guitar down to the lake like normal. He settled in the same spot as yesterday, since besides the arsehole dad it had actually been pretty good for business. With his case popped open for donations and a red rabbit audience already waving its applause, he figured he’d do pretty well for himself.

A little past noon, he spared a glance at the stuffed animal and felt its image trip through his mind, lagging like stop-motion animation. Even when he closed his eyes, the image lingered.

Jono swallowed a groan and invested his blues with a little more frustration.

The rabbit floated there more urgently, followed by what looked like a bowl of chicken noodle soup. 

No matter how Jono ignored it, it didn’t go away. A few songs later he gave in. Even if his powers were gone, it wasn’t like he’d forgotten what telepathy felt like, or how sending things worked. He strummed up a picture of the red rabbit sitting in the grass with its own little guitar, and nearly drowned in the sudden flood of excitement that came rushing back.

Things were quiet after that. He played, earned enough dollars for dinner but nowhere near enough for a bus ticket, and waited. 

The sun had almost set by the time his drummer boy raced over. The boy swept the rabbit up into his arms, hugging and kissing him, then frantically threw himself at Jono. He barely moved his guitar out of the way in time to catch the kid, then had no idea what to do once he had. The boy didn’t seem to mind, grinning like the sun, and the image of chicken noodle soup popped up more forcefully than before. Plasters, too.

When the dad showed up a few minutes later, Jono finally got the picture. The guy’s face was curled into a scowl again, this time directed at no one in particular, or else the whole damn world. And it had stuck that way, a jagged cut running through the side of his lip and bruises coloring the right half of his jaw. The man limped closer with what should have been obvious pain, except he didn’t flinch at all, even though his feet were red and raw. His slacks had been rolled up to the knees, and yesterday’s shirt had lost its sleeves, hacked up into a tank that showed off his trim muscles. Jono whistled, but didn’t move. “Roadkill vogue. Nice look.”

The scowl twitched, and Jono had never been more proud of himself. Once the boy realized his dad had arrived, he wriggled like a monkey in Jono’s arms until he could look at them both at once.

The dad drifted near enough for Jono to catch sight of weary blue eyes that never looked away from his son. On one hand, he didn’t seem happy about the kid’s new friend; on the other, the disgust from before had completely disappeared. Blue wasn’t so bad when you looked like a troll’s chewtoy yourself.

Still, Jono wasn’t quite willing to let bygones be bygones on that count.

“If you want help, you’ll have to ask.”

The boy looked back at his father expectantly from his perch in Jono’s arms, and Jono had to steel his expression to keep from laughing. Brat couldn’t even hear his shit and nodded along to school his rude pops anyway.

When the man didn’t answer, the boy signed something to him and flashed the chicken soup alert again. It was only then that Jono realized he’d never heard the other man say a word.

“…Shit, can you hear me?” 

The man’s face darkened again, and he gave a curt nod before signing something back to his son. The boy pulled a face, then begrudgingly held out his rabbit for his father to take. Only then did his father relax and reach into his diaper bag for a pen and paper.

**Boy = Leeland.**

**He trusts you.**

Jono’s eyebrows shot up, and Leeland giggled and tried to push his own up the same way. 

“…Look. I’ve got a motel room a few blocks over. You can crash and clean yourself up if you want. Rabbit here recommends some chicken soup.” 

The man tapped his pencil against the little notebook, then glanced around at the people milling about behind them. When the crowd thinned a bit, he started writing again.

**What is wrong with your face?**

“The fuck’s wrong with _yours?”_ Jono spat in turn.

Strangely, that actually seemed to mollify him. He gazed back at Jono with something more akin to curiosity, a crow with a shiny bauble instead of a ferocious sheepdog. He didn’t even stop Jono from taking charge and carrying Leeland the whole way to the motel, he merely drifted behind them with the same expression frozen on his face. Leeland spent the entire walk sending telepathic images to Jono of anything and everything he saw. By his excitement, Jono wagered most people couldn’t “hear” the boy. He knew what that was like.

The front desk worker at the motel gave Jono a truly baffled look, and honestly? He didn’t want to guess what shady shit was running through their head. Nothing to see here. Just your everyday troop of blue man, deaf drummer, and roadkill fashion model.

Leeland all but collapsed on the bed once Jono closed the door, and his dad knelt by his side to gently stroke his hair. From a distance, they would’ve been a picture of familial affection. This close, Jono could see the gash cut into the man’s back – as well as the wriggling mass of black blood seething in the pit of it, maggots feasting on a living host.

Jono was not a squeamish man. Hell, he’d met the real Maggot and his twin gut-munchers. This was different. This was a fucking Twilight Zone bizzaro world that had misplaced a citizen or two, and somehow he’d strolled right into it.

He coughed gently, reminding himself not to hurl. “So. The name’s Jono. Ex-mutant. Blue bastard. You?” 

The man stared blankly at him, and Jono sighed.

“You gonna disappear if I head out for soup?”

Some part of his words seemed to click, though not the way he intended. The man reached into his pockets and pulled out two fistfuls of quarters, holding them out to Jono expectantly. A few runaway coins rolled away across the uneven floor.

“…Thanks mate.”

  


* * *

  


The New Mutants had discussed it time and again: what to do if Warlock came back to Earth. There were agreements and protocols and a ten-page primer with extended appendices. First you call the team, then you call Rahne and hand over the phone.

Illyana didn’t do any of that. When the shock finally eased off of Warlock’s face, his brow crinkling with the realization of all he had lost, Illyana reached out and took his hand. 

“You missed so much.” She kindled warmth into her eyes, distant pinpricks of fire flickering like a mirage. Warlock didn’t know what she was; she would have to keep it that way. “And we have too little time. But I can—“

Warlock squeezed her hand. “Self missed _you.”_

She froze. No one had ever told her that and meant it – they missed the innocent child, the rebellious teenager, the loyal if sharp-tongued friend. They missed the girl who died and never came back, no matter what her face and her memories pretended to be. _I’m not the me you remember,_ she thought to herself, and maybe her traitorous lips had formed the words after all, because Warlock’s other hand came to lift up her chin.

“Self is not self you remember either,” he said. Others had said the same, even her brother had offered similar consolation about death and return, but it had never sounded as honest as it did now in that scratchy yet sonorous voice. The stiffness of his form revealed his inner turmoil, trapped between comforting the sorrow he saw in her or pursuing the threads of the current disaster. Her hero with the octopus arms, even now.

Illyana took a sharp breath. “Shelve the waterworks, Warlock. I need to catch you up, and I can do it faster in Limbo.”

He gave her a strange look, likely calculating the same risks of Limbo/Transmode cross-contamination as she had earlier, then acquiesced. 

To Warlock’s surprise, her stepping disc brought him to an underground nursery. He could sense nothing beyond solid earth in every direction, as if it were a creature’s warm burrow insulated against the world outside. The walls bore crayon scribbles as high as his knees in every direction, and floating above them were shimmering sea-owls waving to the celestial sky-whales painted in great detail on the ceiling. The floors were soft, not carpeted in any human manner and yet plush to the touch. A small cot sat in one corner with the blankets pulled free and strewn about the room. He noted a small table, a low bookshelf, and a toybox filled entirely with art supplies. Hex-marks in pink marker.

“Do not tell,” Illyana commanded sharply.

Warlock zippered his mouth and settled down on a neon green beanbag chair.

She walked to one wall, dragged her fingertips across the back of a seaweed-dressed otter, and reached into the hidden shelves revealed within. Warlock caught a quick glimpse of cookie jars and a drum kit before she closed the compartment once more. She returned with a photo album, slim and minimalistic and clearly of her own keeping. 

Illyana didn’t hold it out to him, keeping it in her own lap as she sat across from him. The yellow inflatable chair made a small groan of protest. 

“…I was not here when it happened. I came later. Like you.” She traced her fingers along the edge of the album instead of opening it. “They called it M-Day.”

Warlock didn’t say a word during the entire story; a small favor. Even if she had no emotion to impart to her words, it was not an easy tale to tell. A community shattered, a future unspun, and all their children put to the sword one way or another. Illyana made no apologies for Dr. McCoy’s decisions, yet had no condemnation either. She had no right to judge.

The only part she didn’t include was her own introduction to the tale: a kidnapping-turned-babysitting that somehow brought her back into the fold instead of locking her out forever. Halfway through, she realized why their current disaster felt so familiar – of course Magneto had no qualms with leaving the child out there with a rogue relative back from the dead, when the same story had played itself out scarcely a year before. Perhaps it would relieve Warlock to know his son could win over any evil, but she kept that knowledge to herself.

Finally, she passed the photo album into his eager hands. “His name is Leeland.”

Warlock fumbled the pass, photo album slipping through his fingers, though he bounced it back up with one ankle like a soccer ball and caught it on the second try. As soon as he had it firmly in his hands, he clutched it against his chest like a schoolboy protecting his diary. His crest fell and sharpened in embarrassment, flaying out along his back.

Illyana quirked her lips in a question, but he shook his head, and she reluctantly let it go. For now.

Something had changed in Warlock the moment he heard that name, and Illyana watched it unfold as he poured over the pictures. It wasn’t the sudden weight of fatherhood. It was something deeper, some memory invoked then banished from his mind – _Leeland_ meant more than Rahne had ever revealed. She could use that.

“He turned two last month.” Illyana reached out and flipped to a page with pictures from his birthday party. “We all learned how to sign that Happy Birthday song to him. He ate so much cake he threw up on Berto’s suit.”

They spent hours sharing stories in the colorful nursery. Illyana told the tale of every picture in the album, and Warlock slipped up and revealed his own parenting adventure before swearing her to secrecy. He met each of her hesitations with trust and openness, a warp for her to weave a new friendship upon. Though she had no heart or patience for friends, allies were a requirement for the days ahead. She wove.

“Query: Where is selfkin? Selfriendillyana speaks with hiddenshamescript. You have lost him.”

Illyana nodded, masking the rest under the shame he perceived. “We had a…visitor. He found Leeland, and they teleported away together.”

“Visitor…?”

Something like victory seeped into her smile. “I came back. You came back. Did you think we were the only ones?”

  


* * *

  


Jono kicked open the door, hauled in a full load of shopping bags, and discovered, to his relief, that Leeland and his mystery man were still dozing on the bed where he’d left them. He wouldn’t be getting the rental deposit back, not with that much blood soaked through the bedding, but at least he didn’t have a runaway zombie on his hands.

Walmart had yielded a full harvest: nappies, clothes, canned soup, peanut butter, strawberry jam, bread, apples, and two brightly colored boxes of sugar-coated something-or-others. Fuck if he knew what toddlers ate. If the kid was projecting PB&J, then surely he could eat it, right? 

Mystery man didn’t lend a hand, didn’t even raise his head.

“Oy.” Jono snapped his fingers. Stomped once. Balled up a new shirt and chucked it onto the bed.

Only when he finally shook the man’s freezing shoulder did he get a response, a slow sweep of an absent gaze. He followed easily as Jono rolled him far enough to see his back and the techno-gangrene that had sprouted there. As long as Jono didn’t reach for the boy, his guardian seemed perfectly amenable to handling.

“We need to clean you up.” Jono jostled him once more, trying to draw that sluggish gaze. “You look like shit. You’ll scare him like this.”

That changed something in the man’s face, a sudden realization that falling to pieces may possibly be traumatic for a child to watch. He gave a slow, firm nod. 

Jono ducked into the bathroom to start the bath. The man was still painstakingly extricating himself from Leeland’s clutches when he returned to the main room, and Jono leaned against the wall to watch. Slow as molasses, every move cost him something. Still he paused to adjust the red rabbit in his son’s arms and tuck them in under the soft blanket, oblivious to the wine-dark stains he’d left behind.

He either refused Jono’s steadying hand or failed to notice it, and all but collapsed on the rim of the bathtub, listing gently to the left. 

Jono crouched next to him and pushed a notepad and marker into the man’s hands. “First question: That nightmare shit on your back gonna hurt me?”

**No.**

Jono didn’t entirely believe that answer, but he had no real reason to distrust it either. The man didn’t seem concerned that his son could be hurt by the mystery gunk, so Jono would probably be safe. “I’ll hold you to that. Next question: What should I call you?” 

The man thought hard then slowly shook his head.

“You don’t know or you won’t tell me?”

**No access. Illegal setup.**

“…you a cyborg?”

The man looked back down at the sketchpad and carved out an answer even slower than before, spending time on each individual letter as though checking his spelling again and again.

**Probably not.**

Jono choked back a laugh that startled them both. “Alright, Cy. That’s good enough for now.” He turned off the tap, checked the water temperature, and laid a towel down on the floor. “You’re going to scrub up, but first I want to get a look at your head. Okay?”

Cy immediately turned around, sloshing his still-clothed legs into the bath. 

Washcloth in hand, Jono started wiping away the dried blood at the back of his neck. For all the cuts and abrasions, Cy’s skin was almost too smooth, untouched by the normal weathering of everyday life. There was another seeping wound at the base of his skull, and he didn’t flinch when Jono had to peel apart the layers of matted hair to get a look at it. The cut went down to the bone – or deeper, considering the black spiderweb woven through the area, keeping everything in place. From up close, it was obvious whatever the nightmare goo was, it wasn’t eating away at him. It was holding him together.

“Now your back.”

Cy reached down for the bottom hem of his shirt and yanked it off over his head. The muscles in his back spasmed with the movement, the skin pulling tight away from the bloody gash. It ran from his right shoulder to the middle of his lower back in a darkly bruised swathe of burning heat. Jono fingered along the broken line of the cut, checking for dirt or shrapnel, and found nothing in the wound track. Even if the nightmare goo had sanitized it, it was doing a rubbish job of knitting him back together. The rabbit could’ve done a better job with paste. 

Jono tore open a package of the motel’s bargain soap and pressed the bar into Cy’s hand. “There are fresh towels and new clothes on the shelf when you’re done. Throw something at the door if you need help. Understood?”

Radiating relief, Cy gave a nod. 

Jono gave him a nod in return and headed back to the main room, closing the door behind him. It slammed open again. Cy loomed there in the doorway, all sharp edges and simmering distrust.

“Okay, throw something _out_ the door if you need help.” Jono shrugged. He didn’t stand around waiting for the other man to make up his mind. 

Weird as it was to have a grown stranger showering in the next room with the door flung wide, it actually helped Jono keep tabs on him. As he worked on PB&Js and cups of hot-but-not-too-hot soup, he could listen for the rush of the faucet and the rustle of the blankets at the same time. Cooking didn’t require much brain power when all you had were a plastic knife and a microwave, so Jono spent most of the time anticipating how his visitors could turn the meal into disaster. Not the toddler, no – it was Cy he couldn’t trust not to burn his tongue off on lukewarm soup.

He’d finished three sandwiches when the next crash sounded from the bathroom. He found Cy sitting in a corner of the floor with bloody footprints everywhere. The man’s hands shook as he struggled to pull on the new shirt Jono had bought him, his eyes glazed and fixed on a point miles away. With most of the dirt finally gone, he looked years younger, more like a strung out college student than a derelict Wall Street executive. 

Jono grabbed a towel and wrapped it around Cy’s shoulders. “Come on sunshine, to bed you go.”

That earned him a flicker of annoyance, but Cy still leaned against him to be led out of the bathroom. He collapsed into the chair that Jono offered and watched with weary curiosity as Jono brought over a roll of linen bandages. 

With the quick and steady hand of an expert, Jono wrapped the bandages around Cy’s chest. Not too tight – if you actually had lungs in your torso, it could do more harm than good - just enough to hold him together and keep him from bleeding out on his new shirt. The nightmare goo accepted the help and quickly suctioned itself to the wrappings. Next, Jono knelt and pulled one of Cy’s feet into his lap.

Cy didn’t flinch. Jono did. Bone peeked through the gashes in Cy’s callouses, his toes a patchwork of blisters and waterlogged dead skin, and the few smooth patches were purpled with bruises. How the man so casually moved around the room after walking what must have been half the fucking world on bare feet, Jono couldn’t understand. Even when he hadn’t been able to feel his fingers and toes in his former meatsuit, he’d never tried to wear them down to stumps.

The nightmare goo paid those bloody disasters not a lick of attention. Cy operated with complete disregard for his body, as if he expected everything to be corrected by the goo. He’d never even noticed when it gave up on the extremities and devoted all remaining energy to head and torso. 

Jono couldn’t fix this, but he knew how to handle a malingering wound. With far more care than before, Jono checked each foot for remaining splinters and gravel, then wrapped them up in a thin layer of gauze, more for Leeland’s sake than Cy’s, just as he’d wrapped himself more carefully when Artie and Leech hung around his old team. Kids didn’t need to see broken zombie men falling to pieces before their very eyes.

Cy gave an experimental wiggle of his motley toes, and Jono looked up at him with a wry smile. 

“Better?”

It earned him a nod. With a thoughtful look, Cy reached out and touched Jono’s cheek as if expecting it to be something new, something false. When he found nothing, he slowly pulled his hand back into his lap.

“You can’t walk barefoot anymore. I don’t know what you’re running from, but now you run in trainers like everyone else. Nabbed a pair from the store for you.” Jono jerked his thumb towards the door where a new pair of running shoes sat waiting. Cy immediately lurched to his feet to try them on, and Jono gently pushed him back into the chair. “Nope. You’re going to eat a sandwich and go the fuck to sleep for a while.”

The man ate a PB&J like it was peas, beets, and jalapenos, a foreign monstrosity that tasted like sand on his tongue and required intense concentration to consume. He accepted the apple slices that Jono offered one by one, his eyes never straying from the quick dance of the knife in Jono’s hands. 

Whatever Jono had expected to happen to the goo once Cy got some food in him, he was sadly disappointed. It slumped as lethargically in his wounds as ever, tar slowly trying to overcome its mammoth prey.

“Remember the next step?”

Cy crawled into bed without complaint or delay. He gently rearranged his son until the boy was curled up against his chest, then tugged the rabbit out of the picture. He cracked one eye, made sure Jono was watching, and hurled the stuffed animal across the room to him. Then, satisfied Jono understood the message, he closed his eye and dropped off into a light sleep.

_Message not received you damn cyborg._ Jono snatched up their fallen companion from the floor and sat him on the kitchen counter. If he could interrogate the bunny as a prisoner, he would. Nothing about the pair made any sense.

He didn’t even know for sure if the kid was a mutant. There were all sorts of other non-mutant psychics out there, supposedly, though Jono didn’t know where the fuck they were hiding or what the difference was. One let you read palms in a corner shop and the other got you slaughtered in the street. If he called up the X-Men (as if he wanted to call up the X-Men), and it turned out the boy wasn’t a mutant after all, he’d lose any last favor he could still scrape out of those people. 

But they were clearly on the run from something, and if Mr. Nightmare Goo couldn’t handle it then Mr. Magical Song Shapes probably wouldn’t do much better. He could call his old team, or at least Beak and Angel, and see if they could manage a pickup. Or he could call his _old_ old team. Monet had some gig with some detective agency nowadays, didn’t she? “The Mystery of Nightmare Goo Man” wasn’t very noir, but maybe they’d take it.

Jono peeled a second apple, fiddling with the slices to try and replicate the apple-bunnies he’d seen Angel make for her fledglings one time. Mute dad, deaf kid, and for once in his goddamn life he was the “normal” one. He couldn’t leave them on their own. That nameless fear in Cy was something he recognized, a panicked outsider two-steps out of line with the rest of the world. And Lee was—

_—Glowing._

Jono startled to his feet. Where before had laid a normal if excessively freckly child, there now lay a golden-skinned being of light and energy, his small eyes flashes of intense green in a maelstrom of stardust. Jono inched closer to the bed, rabbit clutched in his hands like bait, and tried not to think of fairy rings and changeling children. His life had already suffered enough pixie dust, thank you very much. Yet even his wretched heart soared at the sight of that whirling, shimmering light, a funnel of gold that ran rivers down Leeland’s arms and hands and ran on into—his father’s chest.

Distantly, Jono categorized this as an Energy Vampire encounter and readied himself for action. He didn’t have a furnace. Low risk. But.

Human coloring returned to the little one’s face and hands in messy patches of pink, while others sprouted dark fonts of nightmare goo instead, alien war-paint for toddlers. The golden energy sank into Cy’s skin and disappeared, only to reemerge in twinkling comets that showered across his wounded skin. They knit constellations out of the bruised landscape, star by star.

The little boy raised his head, the wide saucers of his eyes scanning the room anew, and disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Before Jono could stagger back, Leeland reappeared up on the kitchen counter to coo and giggle over the apple-bunnies. He shoved one into his mouth with a ferocious giggle.

Jono sank into an armchair.

Stared at the stuffed rabbit in his hands. Tried to think.

On one hand, the encounter had turned itself inside out. Cy wasn’t draining energy from his son – his son was powering his zombie dad. On the other hand… 

What the bloody fuck had he gotten himself into?

  


* * *

  


When Warlock and Illyana emerged from Limbo, the island was nearly deserted. Illyana swept through the team apartment for clues or post-it notes, swearing under her breath when she found not a one (what was the point of a message board if they only used it for trading memes?!) She grabbed Warlock by the wrist and pulled him through the labyrinthine halls.

“Query: Have Selves reached the spookyhaunted portion of this day?”

“This is where we live,” she snapped more harshly than planned. Utopia might have been little more than futuristic war barracks, but they were their barracks.

“Now keep quiet and don’t be weird—“

_“Excuse Self--!”_

Before he could finish, Illyana pushed into Danger’s control room. An auxiliary drone immediately shuddered to life and lurched forward to meet her. 

“Oh. You.” Its voice was just as scornful as the real thing, and Warlock shrank two feet to hide himself behind Illyana.

“Danger, where’s the team?”

The drone gave a bored tsk and flew back to its docking station. 

“You don’t want to try my patience right now. Last warning.”

It blinked a ring of blue light at her, swirled it five times as if a loading sign, then gave an audible, scratchy sigh. “You organics, of all people, should understand how… _mortifying_ …it is to encounter one’s childhood teachers and discover part of you is still brown-nosing for high marks.”

Warlock withered under its renewed glower, and Illyana put her hands on her hips. 

“What, did Xavier come to give you a gold star?”

“Hardly.” The loading sign whirled again, then went still. “Three dead programmers, running from their afterlives. One from the grave and two from the stars, and every thorn in my side still thrives.”

“Wait, query, you—“

Warlock’s startled question disappeared into the stepping disc with him, a realization for another day. They reappeared at the apex of Utopia’s tower, stars sprawling out above them, and Illyana rapidly scanned the skyline before porting them away once more. This time they emerged on a mountainous peak a few miles inland, a peak currently boasting an uncommon magnetism and bustling crowd. 

Her hand still firmly glued to Warlock’s wrist, Illyana lunged forward and pushed her way through the murmuring mass of spectators. Nearly every citizen of Utopia had gathered, alongside some confused and starry-eyed Californian campers. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the old man in the center of the crowd, the one pulling a miracle from the threads of the universe.

No one noticed Warlock’s striking form. Even the New Mutants didn’t make a peep as Illyana pushed past them, though Sam’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head in shock. Xi’an stepped aside to let them pass. 

Illyana froze so suddenly at the edge of the clearing that Warlock came crashing into her, his own eyes fixed on the all-too-familiar girl descending from the heavens like a dream. Too soon. The timing was all wrong, she was supposed to have more time before— 

_Katya._

As Kitty landed, as Magneto fainted, as the crowd went wild with hysterical joy for just this once, Illyana’s life narrowed in like a noose around her neck. Her fingers still curled into the soft cords of Warlock’s wrist, her mouth open with nothing to say, no heart to spill – she wished she could cry, that she could scream she wasn’t crying, that she could scream.

And she remembered what Tarot had told her.

“Warlock,” she whispered like a ghost, a broken specter of a lost girl. “I need your help.”

He pulled her onward, relentless as the tide breaking on the shore of Kitty’s bright eyes and smile. When Kitty could not speak, he read her lips. When she could not cry, his eyes shone for them all. When she could not scream, he took all her terror and longing on his shoulders, threading tendrils of lifeglow and affection into the palms of both his girls. It wasn’t what Illyana had meant. She didn’t need a reunion facilitator, she needed a _soul_ and a team to take it back. She needed, desperately, to salvage this one timeline from her failure.

But.

There was warmth in him. In Kitty’s hesitant smile. In the ground beneath her feet. In the very air, still charged with Magneto’s penance and gift. You needed a heart to hope.

Didn’t you?

  


* * *

  


Cy woke to birdsong.

Morning. He jolted upright, head whipping round as he sent out a desperate ping for his son. He’d never rested for more than a few minutes in an unsecure location, let alone an entire night. Leeland could be halfway across the state already. Cy blindly rummaged through the sheets around him in search of the rabbit, his only safety net for controlling his willful son. No, no, it couldn’t be gone, Leeland couldn’t be—

Quiet laughter from across the room. Cy’s tunnel vision slowly receded, the memory of the small motel room around him returning in fits and starts. A rotten taste in his mouth, a roughness to his feet. He pushed off the bed in search of Leeland’s laughter. Pizza boxes on the floor. 

“Mornin’, sleeping beauty.”

Jono gave the man a nod from his spot on the floor with the rabbit and boy both curled up in his lap. Leeland sat enthralled by cartoons on the TV, bursting into delighted giggles here and there for no discernable reason. Though much of the preschooler plot depended on the dialogue and sound effects, the rapidly changing animated creatures distracted the boy like nothing else. Jono gave him a pointed jiggle to regain his attention. “Come on rabbits, your dad’s awake.”

Cy blinked. He sat down with his knees pressed together in front of him and turned to watch the TV. When it was clear he didn’t have any glares or glowers to spare, Jono tossed the red rabbit over into his lap.

“Since you fell asleep, the monkey’s eaten fourteen sandwiches, eight apples, two pizzas, and all my fuckin’ patience.” Jono watched him with a sidelong gaze. The only relief had been muting the TV with Leeland none the wiser. “He’s teleported down the hall, into the car park, and onto my shoulders when I was taking a piss.”

Cy watched the television, but Jono could tell he was listening to every word.

“And you laid down with half a torso and woke up like a beauty queen.”

Cy brushed a golden lock back behind his ear, scowling when his fingers crossed the rough fuzz of his cheeks.

“Hate to say it Cy, but you’re falling to pieces and you can’t rely on a toddler to glow you back together anymore.” That finally earned a scowl, and Cy turned to look him in the eye. “You need help, I need answers. That’s the deal.”

Turning the rabbit over and over in his hands, Cy gave it a few minutes of thought. 

“Is he a mutant?”

A nod.

“Are you a mutant?”

Another nod.

“And something else, too.” Cy nodded once more, watching him openly. “Like I said yesterday, I used to be a mutant. I know the deal.” Raw deal if there ever was one, especially if you had a kid. Jono couldn’t think of a mutant family that didn’t turn into a riotous pile of shit – the Frosts, the Greys, the Shaws, and his own. Hell, even the Guthries were a sad sack these days, not that he was keeping tabs. 

“The X-Men are out in San Francisco. You running there? …Not from the face you just made. So away from there.” He shrugged. “Can’t blame you. I did my time with that lot and nothing good ever came of it.”

Something passed over Cy’s face – not a shadow, not a flicker of understanding or recognition, only some switch being flipped. 

“Head east. No X-Men. Roger that.” Jono ruffled Leeland’s hair then shuffled him over into his dad’s lap instead. The boy squirmed to keep his cartoons in sight. Cy had crashed like pursuers and paranoia had kept him on his feet for weeks, and odds were they’d need to be on the road again soon. “Got something you need to see before we head out.“

Jono traveled light. His guitar case strapped to his back and a duffel thrown over one shoulder and he was good to go. As he rummaged for the tech stashed at the bottom of his bag, distrust and tension seeped back into Cy’s shoulders with alarming speed. “Calm down, sunshine. It’s another card in your hand.”

The moment Jono pulled his sound projector into the light, Cy extended his hand expectantly. 

“Not _literally.”_ Jono scowled even as he carried it over for Cy’s insistent inspection. “A few of us ex-mutants got together and threw a team together. Didn’t last long, but the toys were top-notch. It turns sound into hard light.”

Cy’s eyes flicked up as if to say _I know._ He wrapped one arm around Leeland’s waist, securing him close as he turned over the sound projector for inspection. After a thorough visual evaluation, his hand started to bleed an all-too-familiar nightmare goo. The device lit up, Cy’s lips moved without making a sound, and then the goo abruptly sank back into his hand. He tossed the device back to Jono. 

“Don’t look so smug. There’s nothing you two could do that would surprise me at this point.” He settled the projector against his throat and snapped the neckpiece into place. “You take care of the rabbits. I’ll have your back.” A pair of golden and red hard-light rabbits dashed across the room, tumbling under the kitchen table. “Just tell me when you’re ready and we’ll go.”

Cy hauled Leeland halfway onto his shoulder and pushed himself to his feet. He stood a few inches shorter than Jono, but even a giant couldn’t have made what he did next seem threatening. He curled his fingers into a fist and held out his pinky finger.

“A pinky promise?”

Cy nodded.

Never in his life had Jono made such a nursery school pact, but Cy looked so earnest that he couldn’t manage a sour word in return. He curled his littlest finger around Cy’s and gave it a squeeze.


	4. Chapter 4

“I hereby bring this trial to order. You, Illyana Rasputin, are charged with abducting Warlock for solo sleepover bonding time, and are expelled from the New Mutants for all time.”

After a lot of commotion, celebration, a bit of crying, and making Sam push all the Med-Bay cots into a discussion circle, the New Mutants had managed a passable team meeting. At the head of the roundtable stood Kitty’s tank, thrumming ominously as she glowered from within its walls. Xi’an and Illyana flanked her on either side, the three of them directly across from Warlock, who had perched on the edge of an unused bed and let his legs swing aimlessly. The rest of the team had taken up empty spots around the circle, though no one sat anywhere near Magneto’s cot. Sam had pulled it just near enough for him to listen to their discussion, unable to turn down an “old man worried about his youngest grandson.” Warlock’s expression was undecipherable. 

“Selfriend, this was expediency so Self could obtain maximum information in minimum timeframe. Selfriendillyana acted rightly.”

Roberto gave a loud tsk and shook his head. “Was there or was there not sleepover bonding time?”

“Limbo is not for sleepovers,” Illyana grit out at the same moment Warlock chirped, “Affirmative.” They glanced at each other like betrayed conspirators. 

“I rest my case.” Roberto slapped his knee as if wielding a gavel. “Expelled. The end. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.” 

“…Well now that that’s settled,” Xi’an continued in her quiet yet firm voice, the same one she used when disciplining the twins. “Here’s where things stand. Three weeks ago, Leeland disappeared from his bedroom. Video surveillance says it was Doug. Then Selene…happened.” 

Xi’an shook her head. They were all getting better about saying Doug’s name – or worse, depending on where you stood on the optimism scale that day. Not a single one of Selene’s troops had survived the battle, all either scrapped for parts or put down by Illyana in the aftermath. They didn’t talk about it. Jay’s ghost sat wrapped around Sam’s shoulders like a shroud, and no one had found a word worth a single ounce of that pain. 

“Danger confirmed that the transmode she encountered during Selene’s attack was the same one Doug used to interface with Utopia’s systems. We know beyond doubt that he was one of her soldiers.”

“But all her soldiers,” Dani started, her eyes darting to Sam as she caught her tongue. “—The whole structure collapsed. No one got out. We don’t even know if he got away from her. They could have been under her control when she fell.”

Warlock shook his head firmly. “Negative. Self has cross-referenced timelines. Self felt Selfkin _after_ this battle. They are out there.”

“Or Leeland is out there alone,” Xi’an added as gently as she could. They had to cover all the possibilities. That was part of being a parent – planning for the bad stuff so your kids didn’t have to. “If Doug shut down when Selene did, then Leeland could be porting blind.”

“If Doug had already shut Selene out, ain’t it more likely her death had no power on him?” Sam crossed his arms. Just this once, by God, they’d get their miracle. 

“Then why is he running, Sam? A terrified two-year-old I can understand, but Doug?”

A holographic image of the western seaboard popped up in the middle of their circle, silencing the discussion. Warlock flicked his hand and a few points lit up in gold. “Observe: San Francisco. Eugene. Portland. Self traced old signals leading north. Seattle. Recent. Self missed signal by a few hours. Scouted north. Nothing. Broadcast Selfsignal for 5 lines of latitude/longitude in each direction. Nothing.”

“…Bus lines.” Dani drew the connecting line between the spots Warlock had highlighted. “If Leeland were on his own, it wouldn’t be this logical. It has to be Doug.”

“Or someone else has him,” Amara added quietly. She’d been on edge ever since facing down her grandmother, and she wasn’t about to believe anything good could come of it. “We don’t know who Selene was working with, or how she got the transmode in the first place. Why would Doug run?”

“He knew Selene was coming to attack us!”

“And you think him a coward even now?” Amara shook her head. “He wouldn’t run. If it is him, Selene is still in his head. And we’ll have to take him down. It’s what he’d want.”

**Tap, tap, tap.**

The room fell silent, all heads turning towards Kitty’s tank. While her own ghostly knocking hadn’t made a sound, Illyana had mirrored the action and rapped her knuckles against the metal exterior. 

Kitty looked Warlock in the eye, pointed to her mouth, and asked a question. 

All heads swung back to Warlock in turn.

“…she wishes to know if Self…” He sagged, staring pointedly at the floor. “She questions Self’s broadcast. Technarchs do not form hiveminds. We are solitary beings. None of Self’s people ever saw a purpose in this form of communication. It is only Phalanx who create these networks. Selfriendkitty is…familiar with these networks and wishes to know if Self approached the system.”

“Lee has a hivemind. Are you tellin’ us he’s not a Technarch?”

Warlock shrugged. “Hybridization = New. Selfkin is an original.” He still wouldn’t look at them, gazing at the floor with a strange intensity, as if his shame could spark a new circle of Limbo beneath his feet. _“Yes,_ Selfriendkitty. Self approached hivemind and was rejected. Not an absence. A severance. And only thing Self felt before the connection ended was fear.”

“That sounds exactly like what I’m saying, he’s terrified of Selene and on the run and—“

“They were afraid of Self,” Warlock snapped bitterly, his eyes burning in his solemn face. “They are running from _Self.”_

Warlock felt the realization dawn on them, the pity slipping into their eyes and hearts. After everything, after all the death and loss and longing, their storybook reunion was never meant to be…this. It swelled in his chest all at once, that breathless panic that should have had no place in a chest without lungs, the one that drove him to run again and again, coward that he was. 

He heard someone call his name from back down the hall. He didn’t stop. He should’ve guessed they’d follow – if he really wanted to disappear, he’d have dripped through the cracks in the floor and holed up in the seafloor – but the gentle touch of a hand at his wrist startled him so badly he let out a frustrated sob.

_Selfriendshan,_ he realized as she pulled him into a hug. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t let him go.

He wanted things to be Okay, the way they were when he was a kid. They’d go through hell five times before lunch and still be sacked out around a TV by afternoon reruns. He’d been enough, then. He’d had a family who loved him and always had his back, instead of this hollowness in his chest that never went away. It had taken him so many years to realize it wasn’t only Doug’s death that had carved him inside out; it was the silence that followed, the words no one could bear to speak, the poison they carried inside each of them instead of sharing in the open. There was no fixing it, no taking it back. Even if they found Doug safe and sound, it wouldn’t matter. Without him there was silence; with him the silence would fester worse than ever. It was too late.

“Breathe, hun,” Xi’an whispered, her fingers kneading into his back.

“Self does not possess respiratory system.” His voice cracked, and he hated himself even more.

She kept humming his name, the sounds full of such affection that he wanted to curl up inside it, to live off music alone. “Please talk to me. Or Kitty, or someone, but. Please. Don’t make us lose you again, too.”

Warlock tensed up under her hands. Illyana had told him all about what Selene did, the parade of dead puppets. Had they expected him to be one of them? Or, more likely, to break into her transmode lab and find his body decorating the walls. Again.

“You’re not alone.”

The ugly laugh that slithered out of his throat startled them both. Warlock took the chance and pulled away from Xi’an entirely, holding his hands in front of him as a barrier against any more hugs. Alone was never the problem.

A lie. Alone was the problem and not the problem. Schroedinger’s loneliness.

“…Can I ask you something? I don’t think you’ll want to answer, but I think you need to.”

Warlock wrung his fingers until they hung like the solemn fronds of an ageless willow. “Later?”

“No, sweetheart. Now.”

He shuffled backwards into the nearest empty room and let her close the door behind them. The soft way she gazed at him shredded all his circuits to scrap. Though it was nothing worse than what he did to himself every day, seeing it in someone else’s eyes again cut deeper than any dissection could manage. She kept reaching out, trying to get him in arm’s reach again as he paced anxiously around the room’s perimeter, inspecting the lackluster decorations and never staying in one place.

“Why did you leave?”

“Why would Self stay?” His knees shook as he walked. “All Self ever did was endanger humanfriends.”

Xi’an narrowed her eyes, and he didn’t like that look either. Now it was a true dissection of words, prying him open instead of luring him out. Not much different for a Technarch, he supposed; his outsides were always his insides.

“We both know that isn’t why.”

“Yes, because you all know me so well,” Warlock snapped. Only when he caught her flinch did he realize his scripts had slipped.

She didn’t deserve this. None of them did.

Xi’an took a deep breath and sat down on the floor. It should have made him feel stronger, powerful, to have her looking up at him. It only made him feel small.

“I know that you’re not a coward,” she said. “You crossed galaxies to get away from your siredam. I know how terrifying that is. Sometimes I wonder if I could’ve emigrated at all without Leong and Nga relying on me. I always thought you were very brave.”

“You’re lying.” It didn’t feel like a lie, but Warlock couldn’t imagine a Xi’an who could doubt herself so much. You were supposed to grow more certain as you grew up, not less.

“So I don’t think you were running away from a fight,” she continued. “You were running from something else. Kitty always thought it was us.”

“No.”

“No? Because I remember a little alien who always climbed into the coldest bed to play electric blanket, who couldn’t bear to be alone and was always inventing excuses not to be.”

“Self has not been ‘little alien’ for a very long time.”

“True and not the point. You did everything to be around us. We never really returned the favor.”

Warlock closed his eyes, remembering a golden boy who crashed a slumber party he had no right to attend, wearing a face he had no right—every right—to wear. He’d always done everything wrong. “Your Hypothesis: Self left because no one made space for Self.”

“Am I right?”

“No.” He kept his eyes shut. “Incorrect.”

Xi’an gave a small, thoughtful hum. She was playing him, the same way Illyana had, because some things were easier as games than as life and he’d always been such an amenable plaything. “Because you had—“

“Kitty. And Rahne. And—“

“Esperanza.”

Warlock blinked his honey eyes open in shock.

“Here’s what you don’t seem to get, you big dum-dum. We’re your family. Anyone you love, they’re our family, too. Do you think we didn’t search for every last trace of you?”

For a few minutes, they sat there staring at each other in silence. Warlock tried to believe her, he really did, but her words were water on the oil-slick ache within him. Her eyes dared him to question her; it was easier not to meet their gaze.

“Self…can’t.”

“Warlock?”

“Sometimes Self—“ He raked one hand over his chest, right where his heart would be if he were human, where a warmth always thrummed just the same. “After selfsoulfriend, sometimes….” He ducked his head, feeling foolish. They’d all lost him. Xi’an had lost even more before that, her own brother and mother, and Warlock had no right to pretend his loss was greater than—

She touched his knee, and he stared down at it like the world held nothing else. 

“It is not enough. Self is not enough. You are not enough. Nothing is enough, nothing can fix it and Self cannot…be where you are. Self does not want to _be.”_ His voice shuddered and dropped lower still. “I had people who loved me and wanted me, _a team,_ and it still wasn’t enough.”

“Then why did you come back?” Xi’an encouraged, easing back as he slowly sat down.

“Because you are Self’s family,” he mumbled miserably. “Self wants to be where you are and nowhere all at once. Nowhere did not help either.”

“Nowhere scared us,” she whispered back. “We want you to be where we are, but also where you’re happiest. All at once.”

“Desired states of being = Mutually exclusive.”

“So why not cancel them out and take what remains? You and us.” She combed her fingers through his crest. “When we got Leeland, it didn’t cancel out the anger or the hurt. We still carry that. But we all had each other – isn’t that what we’ve always had?”

“No.” He wouldn’t look at her again, yet still leaned into her touch. “Full or empty, a grave is a grave.”

“We won’t know until we find them.”

“Self knows.”

They sat in a sad silence for a little while, though Warlock knew she’d figured it out the moment her breathing pattern changed. Xi’an mulled over her words, and Warlock thought of how Moira used to fret over how best to tell her children things without upsetting them. Rahne had growled that she wasn’t a child; Warlock only wanted to be a child again.

“…If you get him back and nothing changes, what then?” He closed his eyes again, and Xi’an knew she’d guessed right. “That’s what you’re worried about. You built him up into the missing piece, and you’re wise enough now to know he isn’t. And you think maybe, if you never have to find him at all, then you’ll never have to know.”

She brushed her hand across his forehead, right by his eyes, as though brushing away imaginary bangs from his eyes. “Now here’s something you don’t know: you’re not special.”

Warlock squinted up at her, appalled by her change in pep talk strategy. More lullabies and gentle petting, please and thank you.

“Oh sure, you’ve got the Lone Technarch Prince thing going for you, but other than that? You’re normal. You had your life turned upside-down, and you were so used to being the odd alien out that you convinced yourself no one would understand. But your grief isn’t some extraterrestrial brand of specialized agony inaccessible to us mere mortals. You’re sad and hurt and you don’t let anyone help – sounds like just about every mutant I’ve ever met.”

“Self was _deconstructed!_ Multiple times!”

“Isn’t Illyana’s soul broken into a bunch of shiny gems? Didn’t Kitty relocate from a space bullet to a ghost tank in the last twelve hours?” Xi’an let her hands rest on either side of his head, tilting his scowling face up to look at her. She sing-songed, “Normal!”

“Humanbeings are chemicals and if chemicals are deficient then new chemicals can be acquired. Self is a convoluted system of—“

_“Normal.”_

Warlock blew out a frustrated burst of air at her, warm enough to be uncomfortable and forceful enough to send her bangs flying.

“Do you get the idea?”

“…Affirmative.”

“Do I need to break out a picture book? _It’s Okay to Be Sad?_ Leong loved that one.”

“Negative.”

Xi’an leaned down and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Sadness: Hacked.”

“That is Selfriendkitty’s job,” he protested, gone warm and melty in her lap. “Self is convoluted system.”

Roberto cleared his throat loudly from the doorway. “If I have to expel everyone on this team for illegal bonding time, by God, I’ll do it.”

Xi’an kept making kissy lips at Warlock’s forehead, and he leaned up to wibble his lips at hers in turn, adding in some classic smooching sound effects that sounded frankly disgusting.

“Alright, alright.” Roberto crossed his arms, then pulled them apart and rubbed his palms against the sides of his slacks. That nervous gesture was what finally drew Warlock’s attention. “Dr. McCoy’s out front with some scary green-haired chick, say they’re here for Warlock. Someone didn’t get his visa renewed.”

“Self does not own moneycard.”

It took all of Roberto’s self-control not to whip out his wallet and shower Warlock in credit-limitless cards right then and there. “Not your moneycard, your passport. Or something. Point being, we gotta go play nice for a bit while my immigration lawyer flies in from Malibu.”

“They’re trying to _deport_ him?” Xi’an hissed in horror as Warlock rose to his feet.

Roberto waved a dismissive hand. “Trying, sure. Succeeding, nah. I got this. Do you think selfsoulfriends counts under intergalactic marriage law?”

Warlock ducked his head, but no one missed the low flicker of giddy light along his spine.

  


* * *

  


Warlock’s map fritzed out as rapidly as he had, and the New Mutants dispersed soon after. Sam had wheeled Kitty back into a corner, as though it were a kindness, and now she sat there seething and miserable. She knew Xi’an was having The Talk they’d discussed, and she needed to know how it was going and she needed to know _now._

Something thumped a few feet to her left.

Intruder, ghost, or random wild animal, there was nothing Kitty could do about it. She pressed her face against the glass to try and get a look anyway.

The noise came from a wheelable whiteboard that was slowly making its way into the room, foot by exhausted foot. It must have come from one of the labs nearby. A small feat, but judging by Magneto’s hard breathing from across the room, a desperate one. He managed to pull it far enough inside that he could force the door closed behind it, then spent a few minutes angling it until she could see perfectly from her tank.

Kitty raised her eyebrows at him and watched.

Magneto hauled himself out of the bed and over to a nearby chair, pulling it next to the whiteboard before collapsing into the seat. He spent a few minutes catching his breath and boring holes into the board with the intensity of his gaze. 

When he finally uncapped a marker and raised his hand to draw, Kitty was surprised to see a replica of the map Warlock projected earlier. The details were shakier, of course. (And who really knew where Idaho was anyway?) Only the cities mattered.

“They started in San Francisco.” Magneto circled the Bay Area, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Kitty was watching. 

Who was this sad grandpa and what had they done with the angry, bitter villain she’d left? They’d always had a mutual respect for each other, an understanding of sorts, but pulling her out of the heavens and dragging her right into a child abduction mystery was something else entirely.

“Warlock said he felt them in Eugene, Oregon. Then Portland, then Seattle.” Magneto circled each point and joined the line. “Danielle’s theory seems most likely. They are traveling by bus. That rules out the idea that someone else has Leeland – a real kidnapper would stay out of public and avoid congested areas. Someone trying to hide, however, looks for a crowd to get lost in.”

Kitty stared at him silently.

“Believe me. They’ll waste days arguing over who has him, and why, and what Douglas is doing, and if it is really him, and none of that matters.” Magneto gave her a searching look. “Douglas has him. He isn’t under Selene’s control, but he _is_ on the run.”

_Why?_ She mouthed it harshly enough for him to practically hear it – after raising teenage mutants, it was a tone and a question no one could ever forget.

“That isn’t the question, Katherine. Keep up.”

Kitty scowled, then looked back at the map. _Where?_ Their trail had led north before disappearing entirely. The public transportation system was extensive in that corner of the country, and if you wanted to get as far away from San Francisco as fast as possible without taking a plane, that was the way to go. If flight was an option, they’d have disappeared to the west, not the north. 

Why didn’t they go south? While Doug wouldn’t have looked like a local, his accent would throw any guard at any border. Warm was a safer bet than cold, especially with fall closing in on them. 

She tapped on the glass until the motion caught Magneto’s attention, then traced words with her finger. 

S-E-L-E-N-E

W-H-E-R-E-?

Magneto took a different color of marker and drew a path from New Orleans to San Francisco, meandering all the way through New Mexico and Arizona as he went. “We confirmed her movements throughout the southwest.” He nodded, following her train of thought. “Douglas knew she was heading for Utopia. North was the only escape they had.”

S-E-A-T-T-L-E

Kitty drew an equal sign with a line slashed through it and waited for him to catch her drift.

“…Once they hit Seattle, something changed. North wasn’t viable.”

F-E-A-R

C-H-A-N-G-E-D

“You believe he perceived Selene’s death?”

Kitty nodded firmly. If Doug had only been running from Selene, then Warlock would’ve been a rescue, not, well, whatever villain Warlock’s runaway imagination was painting himself now. Something bigger than aliens and X-Men was out there.

“…He wouldn’t know the school is gone,” Magneto added at length. “If he had gone south, Warlock would have picked them up. If west were a possibility, they would have traveled in that direction in the first place. But east…he knows east.”

B-O-Y-S-C-O-U-T

Magneto gave a small, rough chuckle under his breath before Kitty could even finish. “He knows theoretical people in the east, as well as a multitude of places from his childhood. East it is.” He pushed himself up out of his chair, then wavered on his feet, bracing himself on each cot he passed before reaching his own. “Thank you, Katherine. You have been a great help.”

She doubted it. It was nothing he hadn’t already figured out on his own, he’d simply made a big show of involving her. Kitty didn’t quite know what to think of that. 

_The fear changed,_ she thought to herself once more. It meant whatever was chasing them was even more terrifying than Selene, so terrifying that he had a better chance on his own than with the X-Men at his back. _Doug…_

  


* * *

  


After two weeks on the road with his new bandmates, Jono had learned three things. First, two-year-olds were vengeful little fuckers who would pee on you for shits and giggles. Second, no matter how dirty it got, you did not attempt to wash a baby mutant’s safety animal. And third, Cy was a walking catastrophe.

“Did you get hit by another car?”

For the third time that week, Cy had turned up from a reconnaissance walk wearing his own blood like a fashion statement, his clothes tie-dyed with a seeping red. Jono had stopped being even vaguely alarmed. He merely hustled the man into the shower, put together a platter of food, and disposed of the serial killer-couture shirt and trousers. 

Cy sat there innocently shoveling microwaved soup into his mouth, clad in nothing more than boxers and his running shoes. Except for the shower, he never took the shoes off. 

_“Why_ did you get hit by another car?” Jono asked, exasperated. He’d never felt like his life was worthy of a sitcom – a tragedy, surely, or a grotesque Eastern European horror piece – but these days it was a near thing.

Cy cupped one hand over the other with his thumb wiggling in the space between.

“There was a turtle.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “So you had to rescue it.”

Cy’s earnest nod would’ve been cute if he hadn’t just ruined his last change of clothes. 

The image of a green cartoon turtle flashed behind Jono’s eyes, and a moment later Leeland came barreling over and climbed into his dad’s lap. Cy slowly signed the entire story to his son, occasionally reaching out to help shape Leeland’s hands into the right positions when he attempted a new sign. Jono always felt a bit strange watching such a private moment, but Cy had made it more than clear that he considered it practice for Jono as well. When Leeland wiggled his thumb like the turtle’s head poking out of its shell, Jono dutifully cupped his hands and showed Cy that he’d mastered it too.

They rarely used a pen and paper anymore. While Cy could usually manage a stilted coherency, it tired him out much more than sign language did. Jono wasn’t exactly a quick learner, but he knew enough BSL to have figured out how to make the signs stick in his head. 

Jono snapped his fingers to get Cy’s attention and signed, _More soup?_

Cy beamed at him; it was a strange look on a bruised up half-naked man. _Yes, please._ He nudged Leeland, who signed the very same thing back at Jono.

“Two soups, coming right up.”

For whatever reason, Cy seemed to heal faster off of chicken noodle soup than anything else. Jono warmed up another full bowl for him along with some alphabet soup for Leeland. Then he went to rummage through his bags yet again – there had to be at least one shirt that Cy could wear while they went shopping. 

Once Cy had devoured his third serving of soup and appeared to be contemplating licking the bowl clean, Jono tossed a shirt and a pair of jeans his way. “Put those on. We’re going to the mall.”

Cy pulled on the jeans without complaint, then stared down at the shirt.

“What,” Jono snapped. “Doesn’t fit your style?”

_White._ Cy gave him a look that would’ve been playful on anyone else. _Gets dirty. Cannot save turtles._

“If you bleed on it, swear to god Cy, you’re riding with the luggage on the next bus out of here.”

Cy paused, dutifully checked his still-healing scrapes, and finally tugged the shirt over his head. He didn’t look like the Sex Pistols type, let alone one for band shirts in general, though Jono could imagine him wearing some touristy flag shirt like the nerd he was. 

Jono bent to pick Leeland up and completely missed the way Cy touched the stretched out collar of the shirt, pulling it up against his nose to breathe in the scent. He’d seen Jono wearing it as a night shirt. It felt safe. 

“There’s a mall on the other side of the city. You want to take the baby or the bus?”

Cy plodded over to Jono’s guitar case and pulled out the maps he stored inside. It had quickly become obvious that Leeland didn’t need to know where he was going to teleport, and he was bizarrely good at pinpointing an unknown destination. In the time Jono had been with them, they’d never encountered anything more dangerous than a 5-foot drop, easily cushioned by a squishy disposable dad. What he did seem to need, however, was a navigator. Jono wasn’t sure how Cy communicated the directions to his son, but within ten minutes they were clear across town, trekking across an expansive parking lot.

Leeland sagged against Jono’s shoulders, snoozing lightly. He always needed a nap after a distant port, and then a whole lot of sweets to appease him later. 

Ever since their pinky promise, Cy had traded his hawkish severity for a soft confusion. He still prioritized Leeland above everything, but now and then, when he knew his son was safe with Jono, he’d go off wandering. Sometimes it was ten minutes and he’d come back with his pockets heavy with change, and sometimes it was a few hours that he’d never bother to explain, his skin red with a sunburn that quickly faded. He’d set down rounded stones and shiny bottlecaps as if they told the story. If he weren’t seemingly impervious to lasting harm, Jono would’ve put him on a lead.

As soon as they got inside, Cy veered off towards the candle store. He worked clockwise around the displays, smelling each of them in turn and signing the names to himself. Jono shot the clerk an apologetic look before Cy pulled him over to smell his favorites. 

They tried the toy store next, though Leeland only scowled and pressed his face against Jono’s neck when they tried to wake him. Crestfallen, Cy put the Transformers toy back on the shelf.

Jono didn’t remind him that they only had $36 between them. Though the pocketfuls of vending machine change were far from legal, Cy seemed to draw a line between sweet-talking those isolated machines and working his magic firsthand in shops. He never charmed more than a bottle of water out of a self-service checkout line, either. An all-around rubbish thief if there ever was one.

Even with Leeland snoozing on Jono’s back, Cy didn’t let them leave the toy store until he had picked through every aisle of preschool games and learning materials. Luckily, anything sound-based was immediately out, so Jono only had to wait around for inspections of the remaining third. 

“Let me guess, you’re one of those parents obsessed with enrichment for their banshee brats.”

Cy glanced up at him, signed something Jono didn’t understand, and returned to reading the detailed summary on the back of a multicolored construction set. It had thin sheets of rainbow plastic that slotted into various joints, resulting in strict architectural rules that were beyond any two-year-old Jono had ever known. Admittedly, he didn’t know many. 

“Hey.”

Cy shuffled on to the next toy, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper as he went. 

“Your kid is fine.” Jono dropped his voice, even though there was no one nearby. “Maybe he doesn’t have a toy box, but he has you. That’s more than most kids get.”

Cy didn’t move. His eyes flicked up to read Jono instead of the box.

“Plus he’s seen half the country already. That’s ‘Enrichment’ isn’t it?” He gave it some lopsided air quotes for good measure. There was still a joke about Cy playing classical music to his deaf infant in there somewhere. 

That logic seemed to pacify Cy more than anything else, and he begrudgingly let Jono lead them back out of the store and on to one that actually sold the clothes they needed.

The first time they’d gone shopping for Cy’s ephemeral wardrobe, Jono had been foolish enough to send him off into the changing rooms to try things on. Now he simply grabbed a few M-sized shirts off the rack and held them up in front of Cy. The man could work a pastel, but they weren’t worth the price. Dark greens and blues were the way to go; they covered stains and spills and general disaster more admirably. Two pairs of jeans from the bargain bin and they were set. 

“Mission accomplished.” Jono adjusted Leeland on his back, shrugging off the twinge in his side. His leg had never quite healed up right after his run-in with Machinesmith, though his arm was good enough most days. As long as he could hold a guitar, he didn’t mind much. “You ready to go? There’s a play pen by the food court, but it looks like the kid’s tuckered out.”

Cy lifted his chin a bit. It was his tell for _I’m interested, but won’t protest either way._ Jono shrugged and started leading them towards the food court anyway. At the least, they could pick up some soft pretzels for Leeland to nibble on during the bus ride home. 

He'd nearly reached the food court when he realized Cy was no longer trailing behind him. A quick search found the man lingering outside a clothing store, his knuckles pressed gently against the cool glass of the window display. 

“See something you like?”

The answer was always no; Cy saw things that _interested_ him, not that he liked. But for once, he seemed torn. He thumbed at the collar of his shirt, looked directly at Jono, then jerked his head towards the store while raising an eyebrow.

Only then did Jono realize they were standing outside a Hot Topic.

“Fuck off,” he hissed, reaching out for Cy’s arm to drag him away. 

A strange smile quirked its way onto Cy’s lips, and as soon as Jono wrapped a hand around his wrist, Cy started dragging him into the store instead. His mischief backfired the moment he stepped inside. Cy’s jaw dropped slightly, leaving his mouth ajar in wonder – a kid invited into Willy Wonka’s Mainstream Gothic Horror Factory. 

He stood in front of the t-shirt wall as though deciphering lost tablets of a foreign language and pointed to every band he recognized from Jono’s pointed comments throughout the weeks. Most of the shirts bore names and designs that meant nothing to him, though he wouldn’t drop Jono’s arm until he gave a cursory laugh at an _American Idiot_ design. By the time Cy started signing _Fall Out Boy?_ Jono wanted to throw himself out the display window. 

Every single person in the shop was staring at them. To Cy’s credit, he wasn’t the one drawing attention this time; it was the toddler sound asleep amid the thunderous music. Mostly. It may also have been the stream of expletives muttered under Jono’s breath.

“…Kid’s deaf,” Jono added uneasily to a glowering staff member.

In the two seconds Jono spent focused on the worker, Cy had wandered deeper into the shop. He’d accumulated a bowtie, saucer-wide mirror sunglasses, and was now staring in abject horror at the wide variety of spikes and leather and studs on sale. It was like the kid had never seen a septum piercing before. 

Jono leaned in and hissed, “We can’t afford any of this shit. Joke’s over, time to go.”

Back went the bowtie and the sunglasses without a peep. As Cy wove his way back through the narrow aisles, he paused by the row of backpacks, stumbling in surprise when Jono started shoving him the rest of the way out of the store. 

“You get a backpack and we end up with another fifty tonnes of quarters. Hell no.”

_Useful,_ Cy signed back even as he let himself be manhandled along. 

Outside, Jono collapsed in the nearest bench and pulled Leeland into his lap. Fucking hell, if his leg didn’t hurt before, it sure did now, crackling thunderbolts of pain all along his left side. Leeland blinked up at him, then tucked himself against Jono’s shoulder and went right back to sleep. Small miracles.

_Useful._ Cy was still staring at him with his teacher face, the one that wouldn’t rest until Jono came up with a reply in ASL. 

Jono didn’t know the sign for shrapnel, but he did know a shit argument when he saw one. _Wrong. Slow._

Cy narrowed his eyes and held out his hand. 

“What?”

He mimed a coin-sized circle, pointed to his palm, and waited.

Jono dutifully pulled out a few quarters and handed them over. “Go wild, sunshine.”

Snatching them up, Cy turned on his heel and marched off towards the food court. Jono kept an eye on him from afar. The man wavered once he reached the open area, looking from restaurant to restaurant – what did he expect to get with a dollar in change? – then carried onward like a man on a mission. He walked past the vending machines, past the claw games and candy machines, and straight on into the small arcade tucked away in a forgotten corner of the mall.

Jono pulled his legs up onto the bench and stretched out across it. Ever since The Blues hit, he’d gotten used to even more hurried glances from passersby. The kid complicated things in a good way. Now people glanced at the blue, noticed the kid, and left him the fuck alone. He’d expected people to call him a kidnapper; instead they saw Terrible Twos and didn’t want to get involved. 

Leeland’s nose wiggled, and Jono knew the calm wouldn’t last long. He rubbed gently at Leeland’s back as the kid fought to stay asleep. It was always a battle with him, especially when his dad wasn’t nearby. If he didn’t awaken into the warmth and safety of a hivemind, he was just as likely to scream as to turn over and go straight back to sleep. His little face scrunched up, and without a thought, Jono bent forward to press a kiss to his hair.

An image of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets floated into Jono’s head, and a tiny hand bopped against his nose.

_Hungry!_

Jono watched Leeland carefully as the child signed the word. He’d noticed the way Cy gave his son his complete attention when he used his words, always confirming what was understood and helping him sign more clearly what didn’t make sense. Even when Jono didn’t know how to sign an answer, he’d still make sure Lee knew he was being heard.

_Okay,_ Jono answered.

Leeland scrambled down from the bench and held out his hand until Jono held it. They walked over towards the food court and visited every shop until Leeland had his fill of the smells. Jono bought him a strawberry banana bubble tea and some French fries to tide him over. After the wardrobe additions, they were quickly running out of funds again.

Leeland tugged on Jono’s hand to get his attention. Instead of reaching for another French fry, he frowned and asked, _Where Big Bee?_

Hivemind wasn’t only a metaphor, but something extremely tangible for Leeland. It had been one of his very first signs, used to invite his caretakers to feel his emotions when he wasn’t yet old enough to explain them. The names he gave others depended on their place in his hive: Cy was Big Bee, Leeland was Little Bee, and Jono had been dubbed Blue Bee. On its first debut, Leeland frowning and thinking and holding out Blue as his answer before kissing a bee to his cheek, Cy had choked on a laugh. It was the loudest noise Jono had heard him make so far.

Big Bee was still in the arcade, and Jono wasn’t about to bring a young child into a dank corner of prizes and candy and flashing lights. _Your dad threw a tantrum and stormed off_ wouldn’t go over well as an explanation, never mind that it was too complex for either of them. Leeland was still watching him. 

_Big Bee go there,_ Jono lied with a gesture toward the food court bathrooms.

At once, Leeland began to pull him towards the potty, making all his most urgent signs. 

It wasn’t that Jono was scared of nappy duty – the horrified look on his face sent a nearby mother into giggles vainly hidden behind a coffee cup, sure, but he had his reasons. Fact One: When not teleporting onto shoulders like a needy housecat, the goblin regularly tried to play in the toilet bowl. Fact Two: Cy had never let Jono take him into a public restroom, always disappearing with his son to handle things on his own. Zero experience. Fact Three: Men’s restrooms were cesspools and never had a goddamn changing table, fuck’s sake, was he supposed to balance a screaming toddler on his knee? Fact Four: Urinals were too much power for a rebellion-mad tyrant toddler. 

“Hold on kid—” Jono picked Leeland up, dangling him by his armpits, and the boy broke into agonized screams. Full-on I’m Being Kidnapped-style screams with no end, no lull, and scarcely even a breath in between. Half the food court was staring at them, most in mocking curiosity and the rest with aggravated scowls. Only then did Jono realize his mistake: he couldn’t sign to Leeland while holding him, and the moment he dropped him the child would bolt. He also couldn’t throw on a light show with hundreds of eyes watching them.

On instinct, Jono threw Leeland over his shoulder, one arm wrapped around his waist while the other clamped down on his wildly kicking feet. He pushed through the gathered crowd and beelined straight for the arcade. 

It wasn’t until a few feet outside the arcade that Jono realized there was just as much screaming going on inside as out. 

A haggard man who looked like he hadn’t stepped into the sunlight in the last twenty years appeared from the void of the arcade’s disco-darkness, shouting indignities and hauling a very put-out Cy behind him. Void-dweller manhandled Cy all the way out into the hallway, tore up a long string of pink tickets in front of his face, and finished his grand lecture with a promise of banning a certain miscreant for life. By the look in Cy’s eyes, he was ten thousand miles away, but a sly smile had curled onto his lips and only served to enrage the owner even more. He started screaming for a clerk to come clean up the torn tickets and stormed back into the darkness with one last sneer.

Leeland had never stopped screaming.

Jono opened his mouth to say something scathingly clever. “Please take this,” came out instead. Whatever.

Instead of reaching for his son, Cy shrugged a strap off one shoulder and turned to offer Jono his brand-new backpack. It sat comfortably on his back despite clearly being designed for children: a Hylian shield. 

They made the trade in silence. [Jono took the bag; Cy took his son.](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PHo2-0Lfj7NvuAXR0yEEy9aZcvhT4Fco) Cy waited.

“…You run a con on that guy with a quarter?” Jono asked at last, testing the seams on the backpack suspiciously. Arcade shit usually fell apart within the week.

Whatever Cy had been waiting for, it wasn’t that. A flicker of disappointment shone in his eyes before he focused single-mindedly on calming down his still-wailing son. Jono felt like he’d failed a trust fall, but couldn’t say if it was the kid or the quarters that had done it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for Jono smoking from here on out. Not, uh, internally. The regular way.

Out on the road, Dani stepped easily into the role of a stern cop dragging the leash of an overly enthusiastic bloodhound. Warlock didn’t disappear to cause mischief every two minutes like in the old days, but there was still a streak of childish wonder in him, a prick of his crest whenever he saw a human especially pretty or funny or kind. She knew he’d told Xi’an he came back for them, for his family. Yet it was clear as day that he’d missed humankind more than anything else. 

They’d tracked the transmode signal across state lines early that morning. After snuffling around a motel room that the maid had already hit, Warlock took wing and circled the city until he caught the scent and swept Dani onward to a local mall. They barely talked. There was always something Warlock wanted to say, locked behind his teeth, and Dani didn’t want to grill him on it – he wasn’t one of her students, he didn’t owe her an explanation for anything. She’d put her hand on his shoulder and squeeze in a way that would have been fatherly from Sam, or supportive from Amara. From her, it only meant a friend in the quiet, another pair of eyes on the hunt. The gratitude shining back at her was enough.

When Dani and an overly tall man with long dreadlocks strolled into a back-corner arcade, she was the one who calmly slid up to the desk and flashed a fake investigator’s ID at the clerk. 

“We’re working a federal kidnapping case,” Dani offered, voice firm and disinterested. It was the best way to get answers without questions. “You have any toddlers in here today? He’d be younger than your usual crowd, too short to reach the buttons.” She pulled out a picture from Leeland’s second birthday. They’d always laughed at how dazed and confused he looked in it, and now it was a perfect tiny mugshot. 

“Never saw ‘im.” 

She pointed at a security camera high on the wall. “Can we see the tapes?”

The clerk shook his head, wearing a sheepish frown like he hadn’t felt shame in years. “It’s a fake, only good to spook the riffraff.”

Dani sighed. “Any other disturbances in the last week?”

“Some mallrat stealing tickets earlier, that’s all. Parked at Space Invaders for twenty minutes like I wouldn’t smell his shit.”

“Alright. I’ll let you know if we have any other questions. Thank you for your time.”

It was easy to find Warlock among the machines; he towered no matter what humanform he took. He’d planted himself in front of one of the oldest consoles in the back, a retro Atari with at least a decade of dust on top. His long fingers laid reverently on the buttons as though tracing the carvings of some ancient monolith.

“Warlock?”

He didn’t answer, so Dani followed his gaze to the screen.

**9999 DAR**  
**2310 ALW**  
**2280 BDS**  
**2120 PNU**

“…Douglas Aaron Ramsey.” _It’s really him,_ she couldn’t say. But who else would it be? If it wasn’t Doug, _their_ Doug, then what master plan would plant him in a ratty arcade racking up perfect scores? Pac-Man showed DAR with a perfect score, as did Centipede a few machines over. The best fake in the world wouldn’t have thought of it – not a Skrull, not Mystique, and not even Warlock. 

“Affirmative,” Warlock hummed, a prayer on his human tongue. 

Dani crossed her arms, still watching the way Warlock’s fingers fit into that ephemeral handprint. A shroud of reverence had fallen over him, and though she tried, she couldn’t catch even a thread of it. There were still too many questions. “We’ve got a problem. The clerk was watching Doug, but never saw a toddler with him.”

Warlock raised his eyebrows and finally lifted his hands away from the console, rubbing at his chin. “One does not leave a teleporting toddler. Addition: Self is tracking _selfkin’s_ signal. He was here.”

“Doug must have an accomplice.” That could account for some of the variables, not all. Dani sighed and bumped her shoulder against Warlock’s. “There wasn’t a camera in here, but the mall must have one. Let’s go get the vid and see what we can find.”

With one last glance at the machines, Warlock gave a nod. They headed back out into the vacant halls of the mall to find the security office. Dani’s phone went off halfway there.

“Moonstar. What do you need?”

She stalled in the middle of the path, and all emotion dropped from her face.

 _“Leeland_ is our mission. Sir. Understood.”

Dani pocketed the phone, rubbed her palms on her sides, and turned to Warlock with the same steely expression she’d been planning to use on the security personnel. “They need us on Utopia. Move out.”

Warlock didn’t move. “Query: What could possibly be more important than—”

“Hope.” She closed her eyes for a moment, testing her decision once more, making sure it was one she could live with. “We have to go.”

  


* * *

  


By the time they made it back to Utopia, the cards had already been played. Nightcrawler was dead. They wouldn’t have time to mourn for days, let alone process it, and Dani watched something cold and heavy slither its way into Warlock’s chest to join every other heartache. She’d caught him up on the Hope situation on the flight back, and he’d barely said a word since. 

When they were kids, they’d treated Warlock like a mutant same as them, because he was. They still had that in common, in some ways. Yet somewhere along the way, the X-gene became what united mutantkind instead, and the decimation of their people could mean nothing to an alien who’d always been alone. Part of her was glad he was old enough, sad enough, that he didn’t try to offer platitudes and support. He didn’t argue with her decisions. He bore witness.

At least until she lost track of him among the crowd. One moment his fingers were curled around hers, the next she grasped at thin air. Everyone needed to talk to her. Her teammates were nowhere to be found. It took hours to drag the information out of Scott in between all the more urgent catastrophes.

Illyana gone, gobbled up by Limbo.

Sam gone, already appointed head of a strike team by Scott and shipped off on a mission to get Illyana back.

The others were on lockdown in Med-Bay and no one would tell her why. Josh wouldn’t answer her calls. The team’s quarters were abandoned. She piled DVDs and comfort items into a duffel bag to haul over to Med-Bay, at a loss. She didn’t have orders. Her team was shattered and missing and no one had bothered to call – not until Hope was the one who needed help.

It was Nga who found her, or rather the other way around. Dani pushed into Xi’an’s room to grab a favorite book and found the woman’s younger sister curled up in her blankets, bawling her eyes out.

“Dani!” Nga threw her arms around Dani’s neck and squeezed tight. “Thank God, I didn’t—we didn’t know where you were and—”

Instinctively, Dani pulled up her arms to rub at the girl’s back. “Warlock and I were out following a lead. What happened here? We came back as soon as Scott called, and that was only two hours ago.”

Nga took a deep, shaky breath, trying to calm herself down enough to put words together. “Yesterday, the whole team went yesterday but you weren’t there and Warlock wasn’t there, and Shan said—Shan said it was too important, so they went anyway and everyone here is yelling and crying all the time and there’s nothing I can do to help, Leong is carrying supplies and doing the wash for Med-Bay, Dr. McCoy said they need clean linens but I, I can’t g-go there because Shan is—”

She shook her head and sobbed, pulling free of Dani’s hug so she could press her face against her knees. Dani had seen the girl cry hundreds of times in her life, from skinned knees at seven to her first heartbreak at thirteen, but never like this. 

“Did they all come home?” Dani asked.

“Y-yes. Before Hope.” A bitter, frantic laugh crawled out of Nga’s throat. “Like the story, right? All that’s left in the box is Hope. The rest of us don’t matter.”

“You matter to _me.”_

Dani reached for the blankets on Xi’an’s bed and wrapped them around Nga one by one, bundling her up in her own lumpy cocoon. “Stay right here. Cry as much as you need. I’m going to check on your brother and sister. I’ll be back soon.” She pressed her forehead against the top of Nga’s head. “Love you.”

This time when she reached Med-Bay, Dani didn’t take no for an answer. She never actually received any answer at all amid the chaotic flurry of activity. She caught sight of Magneto talking to some red-haired young woman, and rather than wave her over to make a show of introductions, he jerked his head towards the eastern wing and started hacking up a lung as a distraction.

When Josh rushed out through the door to check on his most elderly patient, Dani slipped in behind him. He looked well; haggard and in need of a mental health year, surely, but as well as she could pray for at the moment. They hadn’t sent him to the front. That made for one fear sorted and all too many remaining.

The eastern wing was nothing like she remembered. Instead of a sterile, organized space with tidy beds, machinery and metal scrap littered the floors. She stepped over a half-cannibalized generator abandoned in the middle of the hallway, her heart pounding in her chest. The farther she went, the higher the temperature climbed, as if it were all some hellmouth with ominous Latin in a gothic font hung up along the walls.

Turning the corner, Dani realized she wasn’t too far off.

A vat of magma sat steaming in one corner of the room, heavily ventilated and insulated against the room’s other occupant. She could see the long tendrils of Amara’s hair dance through the roiling mass of reds and golds, and the twitch of her fingers as she dreamed her subterranean dreams. Dani stepped up the creaking stairs to the top of the tank and called her name, to no answer. 

The other end of the room was an entirely different kind of sauna. Roberto lay sleeping on what looked like a makeshift sunbed, heat lamps circling him in three tiers to create a tunnel of light. He’d been hooked up to an IV and was swimming in sweat. His hand nearly scalded her when she reached out to stir him.

“Dani?”

She jumped at the sound of her name, but hid it under a quick spin towards that familiar voice. “—Jimmy?”

Warpath forced a smile, a quiet relieved thing they both knew wouldn’t last long. “Welcome back.”

“Some welcome. Scott wouldn’t even brief me – can you _please_ fill me in here?”

He gestured her over to the next room, which finally looked like a normal sickbay. The cot that was twice as wide as any other must have been his, though for now Jimmy lowered himself into a chair with only a slight wince. “It was Shan’s call.”

Dani opened her mouth, and Jimmy raised one hand in a tacit request for silence. Reluctantly, she waited for him to continue.

“You and Warlock had only been gone a few hours when they found out Hope was back. Scott gave Sam the mission. Told him to regroup with you and head out to take on Cameron Hodge.”

She didn’t flinch, though something in her recoiled at the sound of that name. Too much history, all of it bad. 

Jimmy took a long drink of water from a mug on the table, the cup dwarfed by his hand. “Shan and him, they figured Scott wouldn’t care as long as the job got done. Berto gave Tabby and I some sweet-talking to make numbers. Didn’t take much. We knew what you were out there trying to do, figured we’d do our share.”

Dani nudged his knee under the table. “Thank you.”

He shrugged it off. “In the end it didn’t matter. Clusterfuck from the start. There were too many of them and only six of us. No retreat; Scott’s orders. Shan took a bad hit.” He jabbed his thumb back towards the sauna room. "Those two figured the only way out was to burn it down. Berto went supernova in Hodge’s face, ripped him apart like a piñata. Amara dragged the whole complex into hell and almost took herself with. Had to haul them back like sacks of potatoes.”

“The medics got a bit creative with the recovery plans,” Jimmy finished with a wry look. He didn’t add the third-degree burns he’d gotten from handling Amara, or the crack in Tabby’s wrist from pulling Xi’an out of the rubble. Dani had her own people to take care of. 

“But they’ll be alright?” Dani asked with a glance towards the sauna.

“Those two, yeah. Give it a day or two. Sam made it out okay before Scott sent him back into the field.”

“And Shan?”

Jimmy looked at her for a long minute, his eyes soft and sad. “She’s tough. She’ll make it. Tabby’s with her now – hasn’t left since the surgery. They had to amputate what was left of her leg.”

Dani could never remember what happened after that. One minute Jimmy was telling her about Xi’an’s injury. The world went quiet and cold. The next thing she knew, she was at Xi’an’s bedside with her face hidden against the older woman’s hair, desperate to pretend she wasn’t crying – none of them could afford it right now.

“I’m fine,” Xi’an slurred, making no attempt to shake Dani off. 

“Nothing is fine. Why were you so _stupid,_ why didn’t you _call—”_

Xi’an laughed, and it almost sounded carefree, almost like she was laughing at Dani and it was all a fever dream. Dani made a mental note to thank Josh for giving her the good stuff. “Your mission was more important.”

Dani clutched her arm even tighter, regret roiling in her stomach. “We didn’t even find him. We should’ve been with the team.”

“But you tried. ‘S more important than…”

“It wasn’t more important than _you,”_ Dani answered quietly. 

Xi’an shook her head, forgetting her argument. Outsmarting Dani wasn’t in the cards for the moment. “…glad you didn’t find him,” she added with a yawn, turning into Dani’s warmth. “Don’t want him here for this. Kids shouldn’t have to watch their parents make war.”

  


* * *

  


“Excuse me, sorry, Mr. Alien sir, can you hear me? Thank you, strangers, I know, a message for you, please?”

In the crowd of mourning mutants on Utopia, a thin hand had reached out and tugged on one of the tufts of Warlock’s crest. They pulled it all the way down to their mouth and whispered into it as though a microphone, unsure if the signal connected. For all his grief, Warlock welcomed the distraction, and he deftly slipped away from Dani’s side to follow another strange girl through the crowd.

“Ruth,” she said, still speaking into his tendril of hair. He curled it into a blossoming flower, a memory of roses wafting up to tickle her nose. “Oh! Yes, understood, you are very kind.”

“Selves have not met,” Warlock offered with a shy smile. It was clear she couldn’t see it, but she’d earned it nevertheless. “Self is—”

“War-Locked, yes, unending, chessboard is incorrect. Pieces shuffled. Ivory on one side and black on other, never gold, Midas board in play.” Ruth held out her hand to him even as she continued clutching the flower-tendril in the other. 

He took it and followed her deeper into the compound.

There was something about the way she spoke that silenced him. On one level, he knew she had jumbled the usual human conventions, no less than he had. On another, she wasn’t speaking as a human at all – it was closer to an audio hivemind, compressed into English with considerable losses. For one of the first moments in his life, he didn’t feel foreign, yet to find that feeling in the belly of a human fortress was most jarring of all.

“Knot and spin, you trust her, excuse me, even now? She only takes, breaks.” 

Ruth came to a halt, and Warlock realized they had come as far as the New Mutants’ team dwellings. She continued to stare at him, waiting for an answer he didn’t have. Warlock quickly unlocked the door, only to find it wasn’t what she wanted, and she watched him even as she led him inside. They paused once more outside Illyana’s room.

“Go on, go on, yes, she asked this, the Witch spins and spells.”

Warlock ducked into the room and tucked his arms behind his back, unwilling to disturb anything in his former teammate’s room. Never in his life had he snooped around for someone’s secrets. What if she had a _diary?_

Ruth pointed solemnly to the bottom drawer of Illyana’s dresser. When Warlock still failed to open it, she walked over, knelt down, and began to rummage through the shelf herself. 

Finally, Ruth held out a worn tarot card, its edges bent and frayed. Her voice was still her own, only sadder. “You hope he will be like you. You hope he will come back to this, devour you at a touch, stay, stay, stay. More than your share, her share, my share. Thank you, War-Locked, a noble kenning. The Witch says: Go and Come Back. It is what, sorry, it is what we do.”

She placed the card on the ground at his feet and smiled. “Mr. Alien, sir, thank you, always listens never heard, thank you.”

Ruth left.

Warlock picked up the card, locked it into his chest, and followed the sound of crying. He found Nga buried in half the blankets on the whole island, then curled up around her to add one more. 

Hours later, he heard the sirens and the rumble of the Blackbirds catching fire. The screams from outside as the bubble went up. Warlock scooped Nga, blankets, and all up into his arms and made his way to Med-Bay in a daze. Dani had messaged him with an update on the situation, and now his instinct was to collect all his people into one spot and defend it with his life. Nga didn’t appear to have any problem with that plan.

“Warlock.”

Emma Frost.

He blinked at her and kept walking. 

“With me, Warlock,” she snapped, the single line in her brow showing not frustration but stress.

When Warlock turned the corner, he split: one Self to continue carrying Nga to her sister and start barricading in his people, another Self to dutifully follow Emma onward to the next disaster, and a thin black cord connecting the two at their heels. As long as he was careful and kept enough distance between them, people usually didn’t scream. Usually. They did take offence when he only sent a sprout, however, and he couldn’t deal with offending Miss Frost at the moment. There was already enough at stake. 

**(Eleven incoming text messages during his silent walk with Emma, all of them from Dani.)**

Emma ushered him into Scott’s office. He didn’t sit. His spine snapped ramrod straight, a Nutcracker geared up for a real boy’s war. Scott’s lip twitched – maybe he thought it a joke, maybe it had even worked as one, but they always forgot that Cable had trained Warlock, too. He knew how to hold a gun as well as he knew how to be one; and he knew that was what they planned to ask of him.

**(Kitty stared him down as he passed by her in Med-Bay. He waved.)**

“The only weapon they didn’t account for is you,” Scott explained. “They took out all of our teleporters—” Some flicker of recognition flashed in his eyes, as if he had only just realized the island’s youngest resident was also a teleporter.

“We have no proof they know of Leeland’s existence,” Emma cut in smoothly. “He is not at any greater risk than the rest of mutantkind.”

Scott nodded. “This is your fight, too.” 

Warlock had never said it wasn’t.

**(He bundled Nga into the cot next to Xi’an’s, bent to press a kiss to each of their foreheads.)**

“Query: What do you need Self to do?” He could tell his affect annoyed them, but he wouldn’t change to suit their taste now. “Although Self is not skilled with teleportation, Self has studied specs for interstellar—"

“It’s too late for that.” Scott planted his palms on his desk and pushed himself out of his seat. He went to the window with arms crossed, itching to pace and determined not to as long as Emma was watching. “There are a hundred thousand Nimrods on their way. We have two options. We can deploy you defensively – if Hank’s notes are correct, you should be able to feed off their power cells. Maybe you can hold them back in time for us to find a miracle. Maybe you can’t. Maybe we’d never find a miracle either way.”

**(Dragged his fingers through the magma of Amara’s tank, watching it swirl and try to warm him.)**

“Second option?” Warlock prompted stiffly. The dull edges of the tarot card in his chest felt sharp enough to cut. 

“…Cable has one last time-jump,” Emma offered when Scott didn’t speak up. He stared out at the battlefront. “If we send the two of you forward to the Nimrod’s future, you could shut down the central AI directly. It’s built to defend against mutants. It won’t know what you are.”

Warlock almost laughed despite himself. _Everything_ knew what he was. Sometimes it felt like every scientist on Earth had studied his genetics, there were so many projects and weapons and horrors raised from the building blocks of his genecode. The X-Men had an entire laboratory devoted solely to techno-organic research, they weren’t that naïve. They simply expected _him_ to be.

“Stop the AI, stop the Nimrods, save mutantkind.” Warlock blinked his eyes for the first time since he entered the room, shuttering their brightness only for a moment. “One jump to get there, none to get home.”

**(A sun in marker on Roberto’s cheek.)**

“Unless you have another option.” Emma’s voice couldn’t have been colder if she was in diamond form, daring him to accuse them of callousness, of cruelty in the midst of a war. Or worse yet, daring him to reveal his childish flippancy, to weave a happy story where everyone would make it out okay, every family would be reunited, and he’d feel his son’s hands on his cheeks for the first time.

Kurt was dead. It was too late for happy stories.

Warlock held out his hand for Scott to shake. “Instruction: When Nimrods fall, tell Selfdearestfriendkitty she is _not_ greatest hacker after all.”

**(Leeland’s room. Pictures of red rabbits. Freckled cheeks. And all of it gold.)**

“I’m sorry about your son,” Scott said quietly when no one else could hear. “No one wanted this.”

Warlock touched his arm but did not meet his eyes. “Self sorry about yours, too.”

  


* * *

  


The motel clerk passed Jono the cardkey with sad eyes. “Take care tonight, okay?” she said with such unexpected kindness that Jono knew something was very, very wrong.

Their TV had four different news channels and every one of them was on a 24-hour crisis loop with the latest coverage from Utopia. Jono knew it wasn’t out of any genuine humanitarian concern. Mutants were a train wreck people eagerly paid money to watch.

Cy watched for only a minute, his eyes tracking pieces of the screen and never focusing on the news anchors or the words, and then hauled Leeland away for a bath.

Jono wasn’t sure how long he watched, trapped in a looped feed in his own head. All the cameras had for live footage was an image of the big red bubble that had swallowed Utopia. At a loss, they’d taken to showing images of mutant superheroes they hypothesized were inside at the time. Some of the faces they showed were already dead. Some were scum of the earth. Others were only children. It was the children that got to him, those tired eyes in too-young faces. His hands itched. He’d clawed up his palms without noticing.

Ev and Ang, strung up like meat, like messiahs.

“I’m going out,” he called. He didn’t wait for a reply.

The same story over and over again.

Jono shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and slouched his way to the corner shop for a pack of cigarettes. The custodian gave him a weird look, and the cashier had a nervous, twitchy way of following Jono wherever he went in the shop. They knew. He hadn’t passed for human in years, it wasn’t that they knew he was a mutant – it was the way they thought they grasped what he was feeling, the way they tiptoed around it for fear of setting him off. 

His chest ached, pressure building like he was going to blow, Round 3, here we go, and maybe he’d take the whole godforsaken city with him this time. 

Or they could just hand over his fucking cigs and he’d be on his way.

Their motel room was on the first floor, so Jono hiked up to the second to find a quiet vantage point before lighting up. After passing through Chicago, Cy had taken them on a route to the south, on through Indiana and down into Kentucky. He’d been too anxious to stop anywhere around the capital, but calmed down a bit once they hit Lexington. 

Jono missed the routine more than the nicotine. A long, deep breath to hold – relish the feeling of lungs, the burn – then spit smoke instead of fire, let it curl on his lips and remember every moment. How long did he wait to do this again, with mouth and tongue and lips, with pain to feel and keep. 

An autumn breeze nipped at his skin. He cupped a flame in his palm and lit another cigarette.

One last cicada out there in the dark let loose a final, mournful chirrup. Sloughed skin. Jono curled his free hand against the railing and tried not to think. If he went back inside and turned on the TV, it might all be over. Everyone gone. Even Paige.

He flicked on the lighter and brought it up to a new cig—just as a hand reached out and closed over the top of the open flame.

“Shit, fuck—” Jono yanked it back, fumbled, dropped it over the railing.

Cy stared back at him impassively, eyes ringed with gold in the dim moonlight. The skin on his palm had already burned away, blood and ash pooling in the wound before the nightmare goo took hold. 

“The fuck were you _thinking_ you psycho—”

Cy snatched the cigarette from between his fingers, shoved it back into the half-finished pack, and crushed the whole packet in his fist as best he could manage. His gaze sharpened when he saw how many had already been used. 

_Explain yourself._ His hands were stiff with fury.

“Piss off,” Jono snapped. He pushed at Cy’s shoulder and tried to snatch back his pack of cigs. 

Whatever Cy signed next, it wasn’t pretty. Jono couldn’t keep up, but he always knew _Keep your filthy habit away from my kid_ when he saw it. 

Jono grabbed the front of Cy’s shirt—his own damn shirt, he realized—and got right up in his face. “Now you fucking listen to me: I _know_ it’s bad for the kid, the fuck do you think I’m up here on the other side of the building for? Half your precious quarters come from my guitar, and I’ll use them however the fuck I want.” He released Cy with a rough shove, sending him stumbling back, and turned back to glower at the distant lights of the city. “Right now some jackass is carving a bloody path through _my people,_ and I’m here playing the babysitter. You know what I _really_ want right now? To wring some fucker’s throat with my own two hands. So step up, or piss off, because that’s the only choice you get.”

He heard the harsh footsteps of Cy heading back down the stairs.

A few hours before dawn, Jono finally ducked back into the motel room. Cy startled from his place at the desk, head whipping up to look at Jono as if surprised he’d returned at all. He looked down at what he’d been writing, crumpled it up, then smoothed it out again. 

Jono didn’t say sorry.

Cy folded his note in two, handed it to Jono without making eye contact, and went to lie down next to his son. 

**My people too.**

He’d misspelled people three times, crossing out each error and trying again in an even shakier hand. It wasn’t the same script as his earlier notes, and every word had some hesitation or scribbled out flaw. He could’ve been working on ten words for the last three hours, for all Jono could tell.

**Can’t watch you kill self same time.**

“…a half pack won’t kill me, you dumbass,” Jono told the dark, his voice tired and almost fond. 

If Cy heard, he didn’t answer.

  


* * *

  


Cable offered him a firm nod and a handshake. “You grew up okay, kid.”

Warlock casually raised himself up another three inches, peered down with lordly disdain, and declined the offer. “Acknowledged. Additional notice: Your arm has Self’s genecode.”

A roar of laughter rumbled in Cable’s chest; it sounded like he hadn’t had a good one in years. “Long story. How bout I tell you someday when this mess is all over.”

Cable knew better than anyone that they weren’t coming back from this, and Warlock saw what he was offering – a game. Not a charade or make-believe like Emma might think, but one last romp as the world-saving heroes. Go down in a gun-toting blaze of glory. Not really his style, though he’d tried the character type in a tabletop campaign once or twice for laughs. He could hold up his end.

“Deal.” Warlock clasped his hand and squeezed.

The game was far easier than the reality. How was he supposed to relate to this man? Was he a fellow father fighting for their kids’ future? Or the hard-eyed drill instructor who’d forgotten Warlock’s name the day after he died? He’d turned Warlock’s family into soldiers; he’d also kept them alive.

Warlock’s attention kept drifting back to the techno-organics woven into Cable’s arm. As a child, he’d recognized the virus on sight and kept quiet for fear of offending their terrifying new teacher. Now it looked exactly the same as before on the surface, but the transmode within had been modified – it was his signature, his Phalanx, his disease. A long story that always seemed to lead back to him.

 _Go and come back,_ Illyana had told him. Well. Kind of. He’d replayed Ruth’s messages again and again, and that was the only bit that sounded like something his friend might actually say. A stern command, Illyana 2.0 to Warlock 2.0, a shared language. 

Cable offered Warlock a full set of tactical gear, his face so serious that Warlock honestly couldn’t tell if it was in truth or in jest. The man was so different – more serious and solemn, though it should have been impossible to reach greater heights of those, and yet open to collaboration. Warlock didn’t feel like a joke. A farce, sure, but that was a burden they shared.

“Query: You have mutantsignature-blocker, correct?”

“Yeah. You need one?”

Warlock shook his head. “Negative. You will require additional radiation-masking apparatus. You _reek.”_

Cable flexed his techno-organic arm, the silver glinting in the munitions room’s light. “Heard that’s how they found us last time.”

“Hard to miss.” Warlock plopped himself down on a bench and began pulling guns and scanners and defensive gear off the walls. He worked them open with ease, extracting the parts he needed and chipping away pieces of himself when something wasn’t available. “Give Self fifteen minutes.”

“What about you?”

He gave a little _tsk,_ as though a teacher trying to school his elder. “There is no helping Self. Selfallycable is humanshaped. Larger area, lower evasion, higher defense requirement. They will know Self is coming either way. If Self cannot avoid, then Self cannot accomplish mission. Simple as that.”

Cable crossed his arms, leaned against the wall, and watched Warlock work in contemplative silence.

“…I saw you once, didn’t I? When you were—”

Warlock ducked his head. “Self saw Nategreybeing once, is that same thing?”

Cable reached out and ruffled his crest as if it were hair, then went back to observing his work.

Why had Cable remembered that? Even _he_ barely remembered that, a brief run-in with Cable and Domino during his days with Excalibur, and he wasn’t about to go knocking on a locked door to beg for a memory now. Was there something in him now that reminded Cable more of…of who he was in between, than of his childhood? Was Cable grasping at just as many straws?

If he had to go out with guns blazing, this wasn’t who he wanted to do it with, honestly. He was certain Cable felt the same.

“Command: Do not move.” Warlock clicked the masking apparatus to Cable’s techno-organic arm. The virus instantly bucked in terror, just as a stray dog hosed down for the very first time, but Warlock gave it a firm talking to and it piped right down. “Finished. Selfallycable will now smell of roseflowers and citrusdreams.”

“…Did you pin an alien air freshener to me?”

“Effectively.” Warlock gave a strained smile and ruffled Cable’s hair right back.

None of the New Mutants came to see him off. Dani had sent him twenty-nine text messages before he finally sent back _**Just trust Self,**_ and she hadn’t sent a single one after that. Xi’an was back under the knife, and the rest of the team was either unconscious or lost in Limbo. Only Tabby showed up at the last minute, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with red. She hugged him, kissed him, and told him to take the Sad Dad Squad on the road already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Berto's gonna wake up frankly appalled that Warlock drew a dick on his cheek and fucked off on a suicide mission to avoid the consequences. (A SUN.) Debatable. 
> 
> Note too that Josh is still around! He may be having a very stressful no good very bad day, but he's not been on a kill squad, ~~Kevin's still alive,~~ and he's got his own wheels in motion...


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A displaced Warlockian interlude.

A future hellscape shouldn’t inspire nostalgia. 

As Warlock and Cable picked their way through the rubble of guttered buildings, all Warlock could think of was Kvch. There was still life on this broken Earth, of a sort, but everything with heart and soul had been eradicated. Twin shadows flitting their way through the ruins, they encountered little more than scared pawns on a broken chessboard. Even the planet felt lethargic below them, hibernating until all life had been purged and it could grow anew. 

Cable spit on the helmet of the man he’d just strangled to death, and Warlock didn’t flinch. He slid into the suit, in and around the still-warm body, and pulled up a system map.

“North.”

No one bothered them, much. They stumbled on a human patrol now and then, and Cable always made quick, quiet work of them. Warlock darted near and far from him, a clever game of keep-away as the Nimrods patrolled for his foreign signal. He kept quick and strung himself along thin and nimble as kelp so even their high-tech radar didn’t know what to make of him. Fireflies in the dark, root systems in the ground, everywhere and nowhere. 

When his lifeglow ran low, he plucked isolated Nimrods from the edges of their formation and drained them dry. As inorganic lifeforms, their nutritional value was minimal for him – a shot of pure caffeine knocked back in a single sip, hangover anticipated. Cable had offered him a human corpse or two in the beginning, gaze dark and unwavering. It would feed him. He’d rather starve.

As they crested a hill, they spied twin mountains in the distance: not one Master Mold but two. 

“One for each,” Cable grumbled as he shouldered his gun.

“A feint,” Warlock pushed back. They both knew the other could be right. A coin flip couldn’t decide it. They needed an army.

**_You have one. You are one._ **

For a split second, Warlock’s spine fritzed, shards rising like a porcupine’s quills before curling themselves back into his form. His heart raced, eyes darting to see if Cable had noticed his slip. The man’s gaze was still firmly fixed on their twin problems in the distance.

Warlock curled his fingers into fists, as if that alone could keep the transmode locked inside him – hands to yourself, children, no turning the wildlife into Phalanx on our class trip.

**_The end of the world and you still think we’re a greater threat than This?_ **

“Shut up,” Warlock hissed on a frequency too low for human perception. He wasn’t having this conversation, let alone with _himself._

Cable was watching him now, waiting for an idea or a joke or a fresh new pantomime performance.

“…acquire Self one humanbody and three nimrodforms.” Warlock said it like a defeated housewife passing over a rushed grocery list, but if Cable heard anything unusual in his tone, he didn’t comment.

They dragged the corpses into the entrance of an old mining tunnel, though it had long since been turned into a bunker and subsequently abandoned. Warlock showed Cable which parts he needed from the Nimrod’s shells, and they sat in silence breaking them down. He didn’t have enough mass to fashion an army from his own form, and hacking a Nimrod’s core would only give the central AI a blueprint of his own systems. He had to do things the old-fashioned way, with a programmer’s charm and a little elbow grease.

From the carcasses of the Nimrods, they fashioned a small flock of one-eyed robotic birds. They functioned on a simple code: circle the Master Molds like satellites, click irregularly as if snapping photos, and flee. Built from the Nimrod stock, they wouldn’t attract immediate attention, and Warlock sprinkled a handful of transmode-drained dust into each one’s body as a lure. While the dust had no remaining system info or genecode traces, it glowed bright with the virus’s alien radiation. 

The human was worthless to them; it was his suit they needed. They had to gut some of the inner electronics so that Cable and his equipment could actually fit in the exo-skeleton, but once he was in, the thick visor panel hid his identity as well as anything could. When they were all ready, Warlock caught Cable staring at him curiously.

“Self saw it in a movie,” he lied. It sounded better than admitting he’d once built auto-propelling frisbee birds for his clumsy Technarch son to chase. 

Once the birds were released, they’d only have ten minutes at most to figure out which Master Mold was more concerned with protecting itself than eradicating intruders. That would tell them where the AI was being stored. Ideally.

They snuck closer before unleashing the birds, ensuring they were within range to bolt to whichever Master Mold held the AI.

The first bird divebombed directly into one of the Master Molds’ eyes.

The second tore its claws into the helmet of Cable’s exo-skeleton, screaming alarms even though he hadn’t built it with a speaker. 

Warlock laced his fingers into a net and hastily tried to pull back the rest of the flock, panicking as they shrieked and circled and evaded his grasp. He’d treated the Nimrod husks like basic metal, like the human scrap he was used to seeing – he’d never tested if it was built like him, fluid and alive. 

Cable barked an order lost under sudden gunfire, taking off over the ridge just as the closest Master Mind lurched to life and readied its first attack.

Abandoning the avian betrayers, Warlock dashed underground to follow sewers and power lines closer to the fray. One of the cords shuddered and exploded in light, catapulting Warlock back topside as it ripped through his extremities. He smacked into a massive Nimrod, dropped, and splattered like ink before rebounding forward with all his strength. The only good side of getting the shit kicked out of him was the kinetic energy to feed on, and as they chipped away at him blow after blow, he kept hurling himself closer to the Master Molds.

Right Mold, Left Mold, a split-second binary choice.

Warlock was never very good at binaries.

When he hit the ground, he laced his toes around an underground pipeline and split. One half raced along the pipes to the left, following the subterranean network until he reached the lefthand Master Mold. The other half kept surging forward aboveground and planting the cord as it went. He darted from cover to cover, his systems reaching out with every sensor to find a path inside the righthand Master Mold. He’d taxed himself beyond his limit, maintaining such a wide field of body while prioritizing evasion for all of it, trying to keep every section connected and sustain as little damage to his mass as he possibly could.

A maintenance shaft on the righthand Master Mold. He hurled himself inside.

The door shuttered with the force of a guillotine, shearing through the connecting cord at his heel.

Visuals shattered, audio looping a scream, tactile sensors—

Pressure sensors—

\--Off—li— _ERROR—_

010100110101010001001111010100000101001101010100010011110101000001010011010101000100111101010000010100110101010001001111010100000101001101010100010011110101000001010011010101000100111101010000010100110101010001001111010100000101001101010100010011110101000001010011010101000100111101010000

  


* * *

  


“If you cut a worm in two, will both halves regenerate?”

Awareness. His body frozen. No action, no movement.

“False. Only the half possessing a head will grow anew.”

Visuals bugged. Fractal sheets of black iron, sprouting legs—bugs in amber, ivory skeletons poking out of tar, bone carvings polished to heavy sheen. Golden etchings in skin, shell, steel, marrow. Thorns grown past their stems, leaves shriveled, garden dirt, gravedust after rain, suffocating—a face—nonononono—

“The myth must come from somewhere.”

Cameron Hodge smiled. “Shall we find out?”

**_If you cut a gestalt in two, you get me._ **

Honey tea on his tongue, smooth and calm. Raspberry scones and chocolate milkshakes. 

**_You’re inside a siredam. You have to pull yourself together._ **

Terror, the endless spacedark curling around his limbs as he hurtled towards distant pinpricks of light. Suffocating slowly, even before he understood the shame in his chest – his mistake, his fault, his decisions that brought Magus to Earth, another planet to stuff his gullet—

**_Uh, not like that. Shoot._**

Babel Spires climbing and climbing and climbing—

**_Listen, pal. You’re a convoluted system, right? Layers on layers: techno-onion-ic. It’s trying to wrap you up in a new one._ **

Why are you—

**_I’m wrapped up too, aren’t I?_ **

Delusions of independence, of flippancy.

**_Oy._ **

Douglock.

**_Warlock._ **

Hurts. Everything hurts. Helix shatter-shell core—

**_Remember when you read to Tyro?_ **

The fractals spun and faded out into the softness of a storybook meadow. A warm sun, a cloudless sky, a thin moon hanging on the horizon even at midday. Heat in the core of him, thrumming bright, song in his veins and hymns on his lips. In the distance he could see a figure moving through the fields, clever fingers tracing the tops of sheaves of wheat.

_But you have hair that is the color of gold._  
_Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me!_  
_The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you._  
_And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…_

**_Do I need to play some Enya, too, or?_ **

“Point made.” Warlock reached up shakily and thumbed at a piece of his crest, bending it down until it sprung back up to rejoin the rest. “Embarrassing and made.”

**_I mean I have the audio right here, just say the word._ **

“Presumption: We are in Self’s mindscape, yes? 65.799999934% reduction of bodymass. Systemwide emergency shutdown. Moldentity has assumed control of extremities.”

The meadow split, a river of living stone carving out a quaint country path between the walls of grain. Warlock walked. If he kept moving, he could figure it out. The only motionless Technarch was a dead one.

“…are you planning to remain as disembodied voicebeing?”

The answer, when it finally came, was only a bitter whisper on the wind.

**_Isn’t disembodied how you like me?_**

  


* * *

  


Like much else in Warlock’s life, trying to explain Douglock was frustrating.

It was the name he and Doug had used for their gestalt, and to the rest of the team, that was all it ever was. But when the Phalanx regifted the name to someone—something—else, something that lived and loved and laughed with a world of his own, things got. Complicated.

Among the mutants, Legion was an obvious analogy. One boy, one body, and a whole host of distinct personalities vying for control. Human psychology overflowed with examples of people talking to themselves, but the parallel everyone leapt for instead was amnesia: Warlock had woken up without his memories, become a new person called Douglock, and then simply woken up one day with everything restored. Nothing was that simple.

A more inviting metaphor could be found in geology: the oxbow lake. Earth’s rivers would meander along in serpentine paths, lazy and inefficient, building up sediment on some banks and eroding the soil on others. As the landscape changed, eventually the loops would connect, waters forging a more direct path to the sea. The former bend would be disconnected, its waters trapped with nowhere to go and with nothing to feed it. Either the waters dried up or an isolated lake would emerge, fondly named the oxbow. Warlock’s life was certainly a river, twice dammed and easygoing despite it all. When his awareness returned, he simply broke his banks and forged on more directly, cutting off the bend of Douglock’s history and leaving him an isolated lake, doomed to dry up.

Except he didn’t. 

Geology was simple, intuitive, and detached. Douglock was none of those. It hadn’t been easy for Warlock to wrestle his body back from its parasitic resident, even though it was his consciousness woven through every cell. It wasn’t a changing of office, Douglock never handed over his keys and shook Warlock’s hand with a sullen _good luck, you’ll need it._ Warlock broke in during the night, changed the locks, and re-signed all the paperwork in a new name. A charming smile was the only propaganda campaign he needed.

He knew what it looked like. He’d dredged all of space for analogies, desperate to explain himself, to justify the change, to root out any failing so he could explain why he still felt—unsettled. 

But it wasn’t wrong.

He was Warlock. He’d always been Warlock. Douglock was just a fever dream he’d never quite healed from, and you didn’t owe the voices in your head anything at all.

  


* * *

  


**_It only took Tyro three minutes to beat his siredam. What’s taking you so long?_ **

Warlock locked his jaw, ignoring the incessant commentary of his invisible companion as he made his way through the wheat fields. He’d avoided the road split down the middle of the meadow and struck off into the high grass instead. This was his mindscape melded into a form the Master Mold could comprehend and control, the only language they actually shared – humanity’s Earth. 

As if by scent, Warlock could perceive the insidious creation’s suffocating annoyance at the situation. Real robots, the kind constructed by humans for humans, could never really keep up with his consciousness. He could charm and befriend them in their binary tongue, sure, but a direct connection circumvented his interpretative functions. When the Master Mold synced up, it inadvertently triggered a translation protocol for lesser lifeforms, the same kind of illusory landscape that Warlock had once crafted for his selfsoulfriend. 

“Tyro reprogrammed siredam from inside.” 

**_And you’re inside. What’s the problem?_ **

The problem was that Warlock couldn’t buck the Mold’s override, and the Mold couldn’t parse the Technarch controls. Systems within systems. Stalemate.

He had to keep moving. He came back for a reason, to protect his family, and he had to do his part. Everyone was counting on him.

**_Warlock?_ **

“Self cannot get out,” he grumbled softly. He’d been feeling along the metaphorical walls for what felt like hours.

At once, a new awareness rumbled through them, devoid of any personality or emotion except spite. No words, just distilled knowledge, flickers of memory with guttered visuals. The first blueprints: Cameron Hodge pulling strands of transmode out of Warlock’s chest like taffy. The second blueprints: Hellfire Club lackeys dragging golden limbs through underground pathways, decking the halls in their blood. The third blueprints: A hijacked weapon in the Red Skull’s hands, screaming and screaming with no one to hear.

The air sharpened with frost, with shame and kindred horror, a suffocating swell that crested and broke into a kiss of bitterness. 

**_Warlock._ **

The voice had changed. That anger hadn’t abated but Warlock was no longer its immediate target. The petulant, teasing lilt had morphed into calm certainty.

**_When have you ever defeated a siredam on your own?_ **

_**Let me out.** _

  


* * *

  


It wasn’t as simple as Douglock made it sound.

When he had been in control, their scripts and form were locked. Douglock had Warlock’s physicality, Doug’s face, and Doug’s scripts. Though he made them his own, those were the basic building blocks. Here are three blocks. Build the best tower you can. 

At his best, Warlock had thousands of blocks. Millions of faces. An unlimited physicality. An overflowing scrapbook of scripts. He didn’t build so much as juggle, a Lego movie where all the pieces assembled and disassembled according to the conductor’s will. An elegant Taj Mahal of unceasing construction. 

And down underneath it all, sealed in under the foundations, two coffins. Do not open. 

One for the dead, for Doug, for scripts he shouldn’t have, memories that weren’t properly his. Locked tight.

One for a screaming prisoner, beating his fists against the lid, hoarse whispers streaming from under the earth, under the foundations, under the kaleidoscopic orchestra. Words carved in wet concrete whenever Warlock tried to build anew. _Still here._

  


* * *

  


It took time to break down all the failsafes Warlock had installed over the years, warding off his homegrown parasite with salt lines at all the doors and windows. He half expected an immediate overthrow, that the Master Mold had forged an alliance with the [rogue prisoner](https://drive.google.com/open?id=17pnzKK9YUpmY0dTyDOOdnqw43ILKqgJM) and now all hope was lost. He also expected a punch. Or a rant, at the least. He folded his arms behind his back and waited.

Douglock did none of those. He ran a hand along the sleek, stiff curve of his hair, took a shaky breath, and steadied the line of his shoulders. He still didn’t look a day over seventeen.

“Okay,” Douglock said, voice soft and determined. “Now do the same for yourself.”

“…Query?”

Douglock looked up at the false blue sky as if checking for bugs, then switched to a language Warlock had acquired long ago at a Lila Cheney concert. Something the Master Mold couldn’t understand. “It told us – it has blueprints up until we switched back. Whatever you knew at that point, it can figure out. It’s trapped you the same way you did to me.”

He said it like old history. Warlock flinched and looked away. The whole time Warlock had been testing for loose bars in his cage, he’d only been putting his hands where Douglock’s had already been. It was the inside of the very same coffin.

“But you didn’t stop there,” Douglock continued. “You’re different now. It doesn’t have blueprints for that. That’s why it’s stalled out while it tries to figure out how your head works.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, an old hand-me-down he’d once taken from a fellow lab assistant’s locker. “Lucky for us, _no one_ knows how your head works.”

He didn’t need to be so rude about it. 

“Acknowledged. Flip the lock. Jail the jailor. Accomplish override before Moldentity can map latest blueprints.” Why couldn’t he have figured that out himself? For all his quiet suspicions about Illyana’s real goals, it was Douglock that he trusted least of all. “And you are needed because…?”

Douglock wouldn’t look at him. “Did you forget why you’re here? You have to take down a horde of millions of robots controlled by one central AI. Also known as a hivemind. So unless I’ve missed something, the only hivemind expert here is me.”

“You are broken.” The answer slipped out so fast and so blunt that it surprised even Warlock. “Self meant—hivemind apparatus dysfunctional after jettisoned during—”

He shrugged. “You just need something to replace the central consciousness. It’s a robot. I think I’ll be fine. The real question is how we get that far that fast.”

Warlock clicked his fingertips against his arm, thoughtful. “…Do you remember how to play chess?”

  


* * *

  


Knight to F3.

Warlock took black, Douglock took white. Each move shifted a set of Warlock’s scripts, hurling the Master Mold this way and that like a ship lost in a typhoon. 

Bishop to B5.

Faster and faster, using the unceasing flow of a Technarch’s shifting to confuse the enemy and cover their tracks. Once upon a time, someone had called Douglock the fastest supercomputer on Earth. The humans’ technology had only grown since then, sure, but no one had tested it against _Warlock._

Knight to F6.

They worked towards stalemate, an unspoken dance. Neither needed to win this battle; they only needed the Master Mold to think they were trying to kill each other. Douglock had whispered to it when it entered, tempting it down dead-end code and obsolete labyrinths that always brought you back where you began. Douglock was made to kill mutants, after all. If the Master Mold couldn’t grow a conscience after all those years, why would it expect anyone else to?

Pawn to E4.

The center was most important. In chess, each piece gained maximum mobility. In humans, the brain directed the body, the heart powered it. In a Technarch, there was no center – but the Master Mold looked for a core and found one waiting, hidden behind walls of sliding tessellations. Something golden, sharp-edged and flat, almost like a—

Tarot card.

The walls closed in, severing the Master Mold’s connection to the outside world. A tomb of toxic transmode.

Checkmate.

  


* * *

  


“Self does require that back,” Warlock whined for the fifth time since they’d caged the creature. The cheese in their mousetrap, Illyana’s tarot card, was still stuck in the infected portion of the system.

“It’s still in you, it hasn’t gone anywhere.”

With a small cluck of annoyance, Warlock returned to checking the confines of the cage. “Step one: Accomplished. How do you plan to proceed?”

Douglock peeked over the cage. “…This is _my_ plan now?”

This time, Warlock was the one who wouldn’t look at him. “You are not defined by bodymass. Self’s ability limited by remaining lifeglow. If you wish to take priority, you may.”

“Some confidence, Boss.” He looked at their prisoner, then back at Warlock. “The system will register its loss soon, if it hasn’t already. You have to let me go for me to hop over.”

Warlock raised his eyebrows and walked around to the other side of the prison. “Self has never been so ready to jettison part of Self before. In fact, Self would have been happy to expel Douglockscripts instead of the _65% bodymass that Self already lost—”_

With a roll of his eyes, Douglock reached into the cage with his bare hands. His fingers branched and spread into a willowy web of circuitry, melting against the Master Mold’s scripts and taking on a golden facsimile of their shape. He pulled back to break the connection, gave Warlock a nod as signal, and reopened his eyes to—

“Woah woah woah!”

Back inside the physical control room, a half dozen black cords whipped down and smacked the plasma gun out of Cable’s looming hands. The man rolled and reached for a second weapon.

“Hold fire! Hold fire! This is Lock/system! We are in control!”

Cable hesitated for only a moment, then shouldered the second weapon. Unfortunately, he shouldered it on his left side, and the techno-organics immediately buckled.

“Sorry!”

His arm righted itself, dropping the weapon.

“Shit, shit—”

_“Stop,”_ Cable barked.

The room went still and silent.

“I believe you.” Cable’s voice was hoarse. Belatedly, Douglock realized that techno-organic shifting likely caused excruciating pain in an otherwise human host. “Now look up.”

He didn’t have eyes, per se, but he expanded his awareness wide enough to notice that Warlock’s body had been strung up and pulled apart like a game of cat’s cradle. Horrifying yet unsurprising. Douglock fiddled a bit here and there until he’d lumped Warlock’s body back together like clay. “See? Good as new.”

Cable watched him very, very closely. Douglock had no eyes, no face, only the overwhelming drift of the hivemind, and yet he still felt that Cable’s gaze never wavered from the core of him.

“You’re not Warlock,” Cable offered at length.

“This is Lock/system.”

If Douglock could sweat bullets, he would have. There wasn’t time for this conversation.

Cable shrugged one shoulder – his human one, this time. “Then get on with it.”

With hundreds of thousand Nimrods in the system, it had taken the humans decades to build enough generators and processors to manage the system. It was a wonder of the human world, a weapon the likes of which had never been seen before, the absolute pinnacle of human effort and skill even if driven by an AI’s intelligent suggestions. For Douglock, it was a glorified apiary. He didn’t step into the command seat as a queen bee with manifold drones; he circled it as a human readying to purge his tiny charges of disease. 

Fifty thousand of the robots were still in their storage lockers. He simply set off the facility’s emergency shutdown and initiated self-destruct protocols, obliterating them within their containment cells without further damage. A few he sent off to destroy the production facilities. Just because was here to rescue the past didn’t mean he’d leave war machines to ravage an aborted future. 

Most of the Nimrods were away from the compounds, off patrolling Earth, and those he had a bit of fun with. He sang a siren code right into their breasts, a giddy dirge in the voice he’d borrowed and never given back – a mutant song with Cypher’s powers laced through every bit of binary. The Nimrods blew each other’s heads off when they detected an active X-gene and hunted each other to oblivion within the hour.

The Nimrods that had already stepped through the portal to attack Utopia’s past presented the only trouble. He couldn’t reach them. They’d set out with their original programming and without a direct revision of those orders, their path would remain locked on the X-Men’s destruction. Douglock couldn’t tell how many were still out there, only how many had been sent. Nothing had come back. No transmissions, no Nimrods. He’d set the hive on fire but couldn’t see through the smoke how many had escaped.

“Warlock?”

It was hard to crawl back inside Warlock’s battered system. Compared to the constantly replicating breadth of the Master Mold, Warlock’s feeble frame was nothing more than a self-important mop with googly eyes. Douglock had never fit.

“Warlock, I need you to drop the leash.”

“What?” He didn’t answer like a Technarch, an old amber glow in his eyes and his joints. Douglock wasn’t sure how much he’d felt the changes in the Nimrod system as he worked on reprogramming the Master Mold core. Something of the Cypher song must have touched him. “I’m busy, you’re doing fine.”

It was funny, almost. Now they were all speaking a dead language – or endangered, if what he’d eavesdropped about Doug’s recent movements was true. Either way, everyone sounded like a petty, pissed off teenager with better things to do than chat. Hopefully it wouldn’t carry over into the new Master Mold AI or the future would be in for an entirely different problem.

_“Warlock.”_ Douglock touched his shoulder, sparking a lifeglow foreign and tainted by that future’s horrors. It grounded them both as a reminder of where they were and why.

Warlock shook his head as if waking from a daydream. “Request for confirmation: Plan is proceeding inefficiently?”

“I can’t disable the other Nimrods from here. I need to ride one back to the past, and I can’t jump until you sever me.”

Warlock stopped what he was doing and stared.

A blank stare meant confusion, miscommunication, a lack of comprehension, a momentary lapse in translation, and a thousand other innocent meanings. Douglock knew that. But at that moment, all he saw was red.

“What’s the problem, _Boss?_ You have all my memories. You don’t need me.” His eyes fell on the Master Mold, its workings split open under Warlock’s clever fingers. “You piss and moan about keeping me around, keeping me secret, all those years, and now you don’t jump at the chance to kick me out for good? I get it, you didn’t want me gone, you just wanted me passive and contained, your good little Phalanx worker bee, so no one else would see who the real monsters are—”

Warlock was still staring at him, impassive, not even rising to the bait. All of the rage rushed out of Douglock as suddenly as it had arrived. All of this, all the teamwork and heroism, it was just Warlock dangling a carrot on a stick and Douglock had fallen for it all.

“Douglock.” Warlock said his name with a strange warble, one he’d never heard before and couldn’t catalogue properly. Another carrot, another stick. “If you ride Nimrodfoe back to the past, X-Men will see only Nimrod. They will kill you.”

“…Oh.”

Completely abandoning the AI work, Warlock turned all his focus onto Douglock. The Phalanx boy felt very small all at once, a child sweating under the spotlight at his first spelling bee. 

“I’ll be quick. Once the Nimrods drop, they’ll understand I’m on their side. Or I’ll contact that Danger lady, she might have a spare drone. Or—something.”

Thinking of Cyclops and Emma and their cold, calculating cynicism, Warlock shook his head firmly. “Negative. They cannot take that chance. They will kill you.”

Douglock flung out his arms, a mockery of the way their—Warlock’s—childhood friends would boast and dare on the football field. “Then they kill me. I’ll still save them first.”

“…Self lost 65% of bodymass. Gentle suggestion: It is still out there.”

“I don’t want your hand-me-downs. I never did.”

“What _did_ you want?” Warlock asked, something fragile in his tone – desperation, anger, and overwhelming exhaustion all cobbled together in a mockery of worry.

Douglock ignored the question. “There isn’t time to go looking for it. We don’t even know if we could use it, if you can reboot your own amputations, and guess what: I don’t want to wear someone else’s goddamn face.”

Warlock flinched.

“Cut. The. Cord.”

“No.”

“Didn’t you come back for the people dying out there? Wasn’t that the point of this?” Douglock threw up his hands. “Guess you just want to be the only one billed as a hero. Nothing new there.”

“You will die.”

“I already died when you stole my life,” he spat. “At least let me make it worth something.”

“Douglock, you are—This is not you. Something is wrong. Moldentity is affecting you and you need to—”

_“Moira is dead!”_ The words ripped through him like a shotgun blast, shrapnel in his heart. “Kurt is _dead._ I don’t—I don’t _care._ I don’t exist and I don’t matter so _please._ You followed my lead this far. Let me finish this. I don’t want to die as a whisper in the back of your head.”

Warlock made no sound, no sign. Something in him buckled, Douglock could feel it as the seconds ticked by, and for once his form never changed, no slip to red amber eyes or disobeying fronds of panicked transmode.

Suddenly Douglock’s sensory inputs ceased. No more Warlock, no more Master Mold, no more hivemind. Then as quickly as it had disappeared, back it came, though each sense was muted by a common static. He blinked actual eyes, imbedded in a Nimrod helm. He moved his hands, thick gauntlets instead of nimble fingers. 

Cable and a lithe sapling of black bones stood watching him a few yards off.

He couldn’t hear Warlock at all. He couldn’t feel anything. He stood silver instead of gold.

“G’journey,” Cable rumbled in that deep, meaningful action hero voice of his.

Douglock took one last look at Warlock, motionless and eerie in the Master Mold’s dim interior light, and turned his back.

  


* * *

  


_Muir Island. Five years prior._

Once Douglock had figured out what was inside the cryo-jar, Moira was scarcely able to separate him from it. The boy carried it with him everywhere, like a cartoon bear and its honey pot. She even caught him tinkering around with the complex workings within his chest one time, and only through a lot of shouting did they finally manage to convince him the embryo was safest in the only home it had ever known.

The first 41 samples were moved to a separate cryo-jar for research purposes, since Douglock didn’t want #42 housed with his dead siblings. He’d meet a different fate, Douglock would make sure of it.

And it was a he, definitely. Well. Genetically. Whatever the child wanted to be someday, Douglock would gladly support, but until that day he’d found himself thinking the word brother.

Kitty chewed her lip when he made the announcement. “But aren’t you—”

“They made the children from Doug and Warlock.” Douglock had the jar sat in his lap at the dinner table, just like always. “I was made the same way.”

With a strange look, Kitty turned to Rahne for help.

“What she’s tryin’ to say, Douglock, is…well, you’re a bit too young to be their kid. The wee bairn’s a different story.” They’d lost Doug at fifteen – his doppelganger couldn’t be his son now, looking like a seventeen-year-old. It wasn’t right. “Your name can be Uncle Douglock.”

“I was made the same way,” Douglock repeated firmly. 

“Yes, you’re family, but—”

“His name is Leeland.” Douglock beamed as he announced it, his arms wrapped around the jar without care for his best friends’ opinions. He was already accustomed to defying their expectations of him in every sense of the word. “He’s my brother, and I’ll never let him be alone. I have a lot of work to do before he’s ready, and then, someday…” He grinned so brightly that Kitty and Rahne felt all their protests die in their throats. “I thought I’d call myself Lindsay. We’ll match and everyone will know we’re brothers.”

Moira cleared her throat from the kitchen doorway. She looked at her daughter and the other two teens huddled at the table, all of them barely children themselves as Douglock made such a declaration. You were supposed to see the kids in your care to adulthood, letting them grow and thrive and mature before they ever thought of families of their own. Xavier and Magneto, for all they’d tried, had made a real mess of that. These three were hers, now. She had to do this right.

“I can’t say I knew young Doug and Warlock well, but…I know you, Dougie. And any parent with a brain in their head would be very, very proud to have you as their son.”

Douglock didn’t look at her, couldn’t. As she gave him a pat on the head and promised whatever help was hers to give, he ducked his face and pressed a smile against his brother’s cryo-jar. 

It was a dream of his own, his first ever. Having one made him seem…real, even more than picking a name had. A dream meant a future. And a family again, too. [Leeland and Lindsay.](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MhY_3ig62OxCacFMdspk22T0YHsBzafS)

Someday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Storybook quote is from The Little Prince, which is absolutely Warlock's favorite story, I'll fight a man.


	7. Chapter 7

It took six agonizing hours for Warlock to complete the overhaul of the Master Mold’s AI, implement the patch, and execute a complete worldwide wipe of any earlier versions. The new personality contained a virus within a virus within a virus, a shiny new kind of transmode onion bomb that would warp and eliminate any outside attempts at reprogramming Warlock’s work. It was something Warlock had been fiddling with for years, ever since his last battle with the Magus.

In their first fight, Doug had been the one to tamper with the Magus’s programming and revert him to a primitive state. In the second fight, Esperanza twisted the Magus’s DNA itself, braiding human and Phalanx strains into the elder Technarch and changing him on a fundamental level. Warlock wasn’t foolish enough to think there’d never be a third fight, and Douglock had been right – he’d never managed to defeat a siredam on his own. Then Tyro had managed it with a bit of cleverness and set the bar even higher still. The transmode bomb was Warlock’s best attempt at planning ahead, a vicious blooming flower ringed by all the lessons of his life, the reverse of his very nature: stagnation. It was a tar trap that would slow down processing speed to a crawl and keep it there. For a Technarch, that meant utter incapacitation. 

For the Master Mold, it meant no additional updates could ever be implemented. Whatever Warlock put in now would be there to stay, so he had to get it right. There may not have been any mutants remaining in that world, but the future would bring something different. It always did. And when it came, Warlock would make sure it was protected against at least this one evil.

If Cable had any feelings on the matter, he kept them to himself. He didn’t suggest they bring the whole machine down, blow up the world, or anything else to protect the past. He also didn’t comment on Warlock’s jittery hands and worried radars. Maybe he felt the same way, with his child fighting for her life in the distant past. You could never tell with Big Buff Action Heroes.

Mission accomplished, and they still had their lives. It was time to go.

Everything outside the Master Mold’s core was dead. The secondary Master Mold appeared to have been carved in two, and Warlock certainly knew _that_ feeling at the moment. Normally he wouldn’t abandon so much of his mass on the field, knowing all too well what science could do with it, but at that point nothing could give humanity more data on the Technarchs than they already had. Plus, if they wanted to make anything new out of it, well. It seemed to be good stock for heroes. Maker knew they needed some.

Cable pointed up the hill to a silver mirror carved out of thin air. Warlock remembered seeing the other side of it where the portal opened into the killing fields of Utopia. It was their only way back.

“It’ll kill anything organic,” Cable said slowly. Their readings had all been very clear on that, or they could have sent troops through in the first place. “But you can make it through.”

Warlock balked. “No, Self cannot.”

“There’s no sense in us both dying here, Warlock. You have to go on without—”

“It kills organics. [Self is techno-organic. Techno. Organic.](https://drive.google.com/open?id=13P7xeIdvNNdZ3GowcpvxUo89Ed1xyxmK) It is _literally_ part of the term. Self uses this term _explicitly_ so humanfriends can comprehend Self’s physiology and _still, still_ you do not bother to acknowledge second word—Wait here.”

Gone in a flash, Warlock returned less than two minutes later, powered solely by irritation and hauling his inert second body by its disjointed leg. He broke off the limb like dried kindling, looked Cable dead in the eye, and tossed it into the silver membrane.

It sizzled like eggs on a nuclear burner, a heat shriek that grew and grew until it hit its flashpoint and exploded into a sparkler of rusted fireworks. Lifeglow consumed, it still wasn’t done. The black core grew into thick tendrils of living smoke, twisting and curling and still howling a godawful wail of hell-born torment. Only when every last inch of matter had been utterly obliterated did it slow into a distant hiss and drop as ash to the earth.

Warlock never blinked. 

Of course, he didn’t need to blink, but one couldn’t let showmanship slip even at the end of a very long, very bad day.

“Your limb is next,” Warlock hissed in the same tone as his still-steaming flesh. 

Cable held up his hands in the intergalactic gesture for _alright you’ve got me there,_ then took a step back.

Warlock opened his mouth to continue his well-earned quarter-life crisis and had just given another wave of his lifeless ragdoll double when the portal flashed and sparked once more. A broad silver head poked through.

“Did someone throw a leg through here? That’s a violation of intertemporal alien refuse dumping laws and I’ll have to bring you back to this timeline for questioning—”

Cable gave Douglock a proud nod of his head. Warlock simply began to scream on a frequency inaudible to humans and resolved to never stop screaming again.

_**Geez Dad, is this really the time for histrionics?** _

Warlock stopped screaming. Everything stopped. He could never unhear what Douglock had just said to him over their comm channel. 

Cable heard nothing. “How’re they holding up?”

“Fewer casualties than I could’ve hoped – thanks to your Hope.” He tried to make finger-guns with his three-fingered gauntlets, then settled for stretching his arms wide and crossing them behind his head. “She ripped Bastion to shreds. If you were trying to teach her overkill, congrats, she passed that course with flying colors.”

No one would ever believe him, but Douglock swore Cable grinned.

“Nimrods are taken care of. I had to hop a few of ‘em before Piotr and I had a dramatic Say-Something-Only-You-Would-Know friendship reunion and hugged it out. Big guy’s got my back.” Douglock looked down. “…Even when I’m the big guy for a day. Anyway.”

“You—convinced…them?” Warlock asked cautiously.

Douglock couldn’t raise an eyebrow; Nimrods didn’t have them. He did cock a hip and put a hand on it pointedly. “I’m language, aren’t I?”

“What did you _say?”_

After a long look, Douglock turned back to Cable. “This weirdo’s more interested in my private business than getting back home. You want a ride while he tries to get those old gears turning?”

In the end, all it took to pass through the silver portal was a barrier around the organics. The Nimrod just managed to fit Cable inside for the first trip, unceremoniously dumping him into his daughter’s arms on the other side. Though all of the Utopian mutants still stared at it with various forms of revulsion and distrust, Cable’s miraculous reappearance was a good enough distraction. Douglock slipped back to the future without any trouble.

Warlock had settled down cross-legged in the dirt, his cast off mass discarded behind him. He didn’t look up at Douglock when he reemerged. He only looked at the sky.

Douglock stood in front of him, unsure how to bend his borrowed form to sit down as well.

“…You could leave Self here,” Warlock announced at length. He watched the sun with sad eyes, its fire burning in them as though for the last time, birthday candles reflected in the eyes of a child about to blow them out. “You are the herobeing. Self helped but…everything that mattered. Everything with skill and cleverness. Douglockself did that alone. No one had to ask.”

After everything, Warlock’s heart hadn’t changed. But for the first time, it didn’t need to. It didn’t matter. 

“Like I said. I don’t want your hand-me-downs. I don’t want to replace you.” He didn’t want a Nimrod for a body, a symbol of genocide and loathing. Better a corpse. Better a whisper. “I never wanted to replace _either_ of you. I just knew where I came from. And even when you’re as infuriating as you are right now, I—”

Warlock was watching him, now. Douglock finally met his eyes.

“You gave me something to live up to.”

Rising to his feet once more, Warlock joined Douglock by the portal. “Query: When Selves return, what will you do?”

He’d never been dignified with _Selves_ before. Self had only ever been Warlock, and then Warlock+Tyro. It felt like the greatest gift in the world, present and future alike. “What do you think I’ll do?”

“Adventuring. It is in your circuits. Odd body, though.”

Douglock shook his head. “I wouldn’t, not in this. It needs to be burned like the rest.”

“And it is not Phalanx.” Warlock held up a hand before Douglock could even protest. “You are what you are. Douglockself always accepted this. It is Self who could not.” He’d never hated Douglock; he’d only hated himself so very deeply, blamed and shamed himself for all the victims his own victimization had claimed. It had blinded him to everything else, and when Douglock didn’t share that revulsion, Warlock cast him away as though he, too, were poison. 

“Can we save the emotional breakdown until we’re all home safe?” Douglock asked shakily, watching over Warlock’s shoulder as though he expected another attack at any moment. He did the only thing he could think of to hurry Warlock along: his very best impression of the elder alien. “Command: Hop into Gundamheroself’s chest and Selves will nyoomzoom away lickety-split—!"

“Self does not sound like that,” Warlock grumbled even as he did as asked. While he’d simply turned liquid to fit into the cracks, they still seemed to poke knees and elbows into each other out of habit.

It was only as they passed through the portal that Warlock felt it.

His lifeglow was boiling in his circuits, evaporating from his cells and shrinking him in on himself. Just like when he’d thrown his leg inside. Normally it wouldn’t have been severe enough to notice, no more than a ruddy burn on a human’s shoulders after cooking themself too long in the sun. With his body mass halved and his lifeglow underfed, however, it was utterly exhausting. He felt like he’d been caught in his own tar trap, and maybe that was why it took him so long to realize.

Douglock had only taken his scripts, rejecting any carryover portion of Warlock’s lifeglow.

Douglock had made the trip back to the past to reprogram the Nimrods. He’d made a roundtrip to send Cable home. He was on another roundtrip now. 

Five trips through a lifeglow desiccator with only a Nimrod’s power cells to live on.

“Nononono—”

Warlock slipped free the moment they hit the air above San Francisco, reaching out with scrambling hands as the Nimrod’s form froze and dropped. They crashed against the broken slope of the highway below, a five-ton interruption to Cable’s spontaneous homecoming celebration. 

Warlock didn’t notice any of it. He planted himself in the Nimrod’s legs, feeding lifeglow into the system as though trying to transfuse blood into cement. His fingers sharpened into cleavers and bolt-cutters and knives with surgical precision, he clawed into the machine’s chest and head and dug desperately for a core that had to be there, somewhere, encrusted with gold – he had to pull the script back before it failed, this wasn’t a Technarch body, there wasn’t an On/Off power switch to flip, this was a foreign invader in a faulty body that deserved better than—

He was a Technarch and he was Phalanx, too. 

The X-Men yelled all around him, regrouping as if expecting a new threat and asking him questions in languages he didn’t understand. All his sensors had zeroed in on his sole task, all of his thoughts directed towards singular purpose. Someone screamed, and then someone else, but he didn’t hear. He didn’t know what his form looked like, didn’t wonder what they must think of him elbow-deep in a Nimrod’s gut.

If the Phalanx could do it, then so could he.

Warlock knew the interior workings of the Nimrods by heart, and he ripped it apart just as he had for his ill-fated birds. The material was like him, like them. The pieces spoke a language foreign yet mastered. Tamed. Technarchs and Nimrods were the same, all they could ever do was destroy, but the Phalanx were cleverer by far, tinkerers of genecode who reached always for the stars. They could create. He could create.

Someone touched his shoulder and it melted away under their fingers, reforming on the other side as a mirror image and resuming its work. Almost there. System wipe in process but incomplete, not all gone, he was a complicated system that nothing could stop, onions within onions and at the very deepest core—

He caught the very last spark.

  


* * *

  


Somewhere along the way, [Jono’s little band of misfits](https://drive.google.com/open?id=13wrUGRETCFgkNJkuvosraWy8N6c0G0LS) developed a schedule. Cy rose with the dawn and set a pot boiling for Jono’s tea. He roused Leeland, brushed the child’s teeth, put him in the day’s clothes, and began his morning sign lessons. It was only when Jono dragged himself out of bed that breakfast began – Cy had been banned from attempting even cereal with milk, so Jono had to handle all of it.

Once Jono had fed the band, they took to the road and hopped to a new suburb a few counties over. Their pace had slowed down after the troubles out in San Francisco made cross-country travel a political statement. While Cy’s paranoia intensified the slower they moved, he never nudged Jono towards so much as a hat as disguise. They traveled together or not at all. 

In the afternoons, Jono and Leeland set up in a local park for a few hours of music and enthusiastic drumming. Cy disappeared on his rounds of vending machine looting, only to reappear in the evenings with his backpack heavy with change, a grocery bag hanging from his hands, and a new motel key. Dinner and another round of signing practice ensued, followed by putting the little one to bed. 

Jono usually took a smoke break after that. The news reports had implied miraculously low casualties in San Francisco, but he didn’t trust them to count mutant lives as important as human casualties. He fiddled with his phone, pressing buttons and erasing the numbers, never ready to dial. 

Sometimes Cy would sit outside in his awkward, off-putting silence. He’d look at his hands, work at scrubbing a new stain out of the stuffed rabbit’s ear, or stare up at the sky. He never watched Jono.

Silence and Jono went way back. Silence was the absence of music, of a tongue, of a family or friend to call your own. Even those old leather straps around his chest and face had never been wrapped quite as tightly, never been part of him as much as the quiet stillness of a basement room. When the leather came off, when his jaw clenched anew and his mouth spat every swear in the book – that silence had still never left, weighing down his shoulders even now.

What Cy carried was different. It was a kind of static, a heaviness that itched the same way a nullification field drowned out telepathy. While Jono had thrown his voice towards anyone who’d listen, raging against the inevitable, Cy had let himself be snuffed out. It felt palpably _wrong,_ unnatural in a way an X-gene couldn’t describe. Cotton and padded rooms. 

Cy still flinched every time Jono lit a new cigarette, eyes darting over and away. 

“You doing penance for pissing me off?” Jono asked. He didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t get one. What he did get were Cy’s eyes flashing gold in the light. His companions were always eerie at night under the moon, as though they would melt away into starshine if they ever stopped running. 

“Fine. But don’t mouth off when your kid ports off with your back turned.”

Cy shook his head, his tousled hair bouncing with the sharp gesture. There was still a bandaid on his cheek from earlier, when he’d come home with a sliced jaw and Leeland had worriedly patched him up with bunny plasters. 

“…You waiting to try one?”

Cy shook his head again.

“Good, because you can get your own, mate.” Jono looked back down at his phone, thumb drifting over the P’s in his contact list.

A sneeze almost startled him into hitting Call, and he pocketed the phone in a rush. When he looked over, he found Cy staring in confusion at his palms, as though he’d caught the sneeze and was now inspecting it for clues. A moment later, Jono’s leather jacket smacked him lightly on the head. Cy pulled down the offending piece of clothing and eyed Jono with another unspoken question.

Jono lit another cigarette. “You get cold and end up turning blue, I’ll lose my act. Self-preservation, sunshine.” 

Cy watched him for a long moment, a buffering period Jono was all too familiar with these days. Then Cy simply stood and walked back inside. He took the jacket with him.

  


* * *

  


Warlock didn’t speak a word during the celebration on Utopia. Untouched by the crowd’s exhausted, hysterical joy, it was with a speculative interest that he watched Hope and Scott’s euphoria at Cable’s return. There was a moment when Cable tried to share the credit, but something on Warlock’s face directed him otherwise. Cable didn’t truly understand what had happened in the future; if the situation were anything else, Warlock would’ve been touched that he was even trying. 

Whenever no one was looking at him, Warlock let his fingers drift over his chest, following the line that a human clavicle would make. He kept thinking of Kurt, of long arguments about whether Technarchs and Phalanx had souls. They didn’t. They had lifeglow. It was a tangible fact, not a belief. Yet Kurt thought— _believed_ —that they were people, and that all people were cherished and loved by his deity, so of course they had souls. 

It was a conversation he’d taken up again years later and galaxies away, when Adam Warlock asked offhand if it was true Technarchs ate souls. Warlock didn’t know.

He touched his chest again.

As soon as he could slip away, he ducked into the dim halls of the main complex and tried to remember his way to Med-Bay. Navigation had never been an issue for him, thanks to his complex interlocking systems of heat-sense, x-ray, and spatial agility. Now he had to trudge along like an ordinary humanoid, one foot in front of the other. Even calling up a mental map would be a drain on his systems. In human terms, he was running on stubbornness alone.

After two dead-end corridors and some brief elevator confusion (why was the first floor not the first floor?!), he finally made it to Med-Bay. Kitty would know what to do. She’d be—angry, probably, before he won her over. He couldn’t go on alone either way.

“Touch me again and it’ll be the last time you have a hand.”

Warlock poked his head inside to find Illyana, clad in a hospital gown and armed with her soulsword in hand, trying to fend off a very nonplussed Kavita Rao. She backed away from the cot with her sword between her and the doctor. “I don’t have time for this. I am fine. I have business to—” 

She whirled and almost stumbled into Warlock. He was glad she didn’t; for the first time, he couldn’t have caught her.

“You’re…here.” Illyana looked as shell-shocked as he still felt. “I was going to. You know. Stepping discs.”

_Go and come back. It is what we do._

All those childhood adventures and still he’d forgotten. Warlock sank to his knees, his stomach full of butterflies and laughter, and smacked his hands against his forehead. “Self thought—but selfriend, Selfallycable is _too big_ for Magik School Bus.”

She pushed his shoulder and watched him swing back and forth like a pendulum. “Didn’t you get my message?”

Warlock drew the Tarot card out from behind his ear and held it out to her. “Lost in translation. Apologies.”

Illyana didn’t blink. “You managed.”

“Self went and came back.”

He thought, in another time, she might have smiled. For now she gave only a single shake of her head to dispell his nonsense from her aura. 

Kavita Rao had turned back to her other patients, clearly both trusting of his intent and unaware of his situation. He was glad not to have encountered Danger or Jeffries in the halls – coming this far into the complex could’ve had dire repercussions. 

Lowering his voice so only Illyana was in range, Warlock angled himself against the rest of the world. “Query: Is selfriend well enough for transport to Limbonursery? Same place you brought Self before.” 

She scanned his face, his ribs, and said not a word. A few moments later, they dropped into the flashing ring of a stepping disc and disappeared.

Warlock collapsed into the blanket pile as soon as they arrived, though only his legs and arms gave way. His chest never moved or shifted an inch, a solid rectangular box he balanced carefully with the rest of his weary form. 

Illyana lay the card on the table. “What did you do.” It wasn’t a question.

“You want something from Self,” Warlock wheezed. He was so tired. “Self is not stupid. Not in _that_ aspect. Self will assist with whatever selfriend needs.”

“Warlock.”

“Now Self needs something from you. This—nursery. Self needs it. Cannot be on Earthplanet. Must be protected. Please.” 

“What did you do?” 

This time it sounded like something a friend would actually ask another friend, only through the bars of a jailhouse after a drunk and disorderly arrest. Warlock wasn’t sure which was better. Either way, easiest to show her.

Warlock’s ribcage split down the middle like stage curtains on opening night. Inside, nestled among techno-organic bubble-wrap, sat a pale blue egg. 

Illyana froze. Her eyes flicked up to search Warlock’s gaunt face, then back to the egg. There was a joke in there, somewhere, as if they could walk through a stepping disc and find it – a teenage girl chiding an infant Technarch to stop hoarding bird nests. 

“It is Phalanx. It requires stasis and regular power. No fluctuations. Self must leave it somewhere safe and Earthbeings will not suffer Phalanx.” He couldn’t suffer them either, unless they were related to him. It was a hypocrisy he was beginning to come to terms with. “Self knows Self’s presence here is danger to you. _Please_ selfriend. Let Self use Limbonursery and Self will do _anything_ you ask.”

He could see Illyana run the calculations in her head. It was a secure location, already isolated due to all the precautions she’d taken with Leeland. She didn’t need to worry about manipulating Warlock if he were ready and eager for any task she appointed him. 

“Is it Douglock?” she finally asked.

Warlock brought his hand up to the gaping hole of his chest, as though ready to protect the egg inside at any cost. “Affirmative. Self—hopes. Complications occurred.” He tried for a smile. “Self has made many mistakes.”

Illyana gave a nod and crossed her arms. “Katya will have my head if I refuse you. She is a greater danger than your Phalanx. You may take what you need. Then we will discuss payment.”

“Query: Could selfriend perchance find Self some consumables? Insufficient lifeglow to charge power cells for apparatus.”

Her lip twitched into a brutal smile. She’d been itching for battle ever since that mortifying rescue hours earlier. “You owe me.”

“Affirmative. Self knows.”

He also knew how soon she’d come to collect.

  


* * *

  


Once they hit Baltimore, Cy’s unease skyrocketed. He rarely turned up injured; he rarely left to begin with. When they moved together through crowds, he always clutched Leeland to his chest with one arm and held Jono’s hand with the other. When they moved apart, Cy circled them as a satellite just out of sight. He didn’t even pretend to sleep. They stopped busking, getting by entirely on Cy’s growing crime spree. In a fit of panic, he’d finally charmed a twenty out of a cash machine to buy milk and nappies for his screaming toddler.

Honestly, Jono figured Cy had heard five words of Jono’s accent and decided he had contacts to hide them in the UK. It was the kind of black-and-white bizarro logic that Cy excelled at. They’d never make it on a plane, but a few hacked terminals and they could sneak onto a boat just fine. Yet Cy never inspected the port at all. He simply turned them north, hugging the coastline until they reached the Susquehanna. 

Even Leeland could tell something was wrong. He’d wriggle out of his father’s arms as though desperate for independence, then immediately hold out his hands for Jono to pick him up. Whoever wasn’t carrying Leeland had to carry the rabbit. The little one tried to balance him the best he could, practicing his signs in the hollow between his chest and whoever was carrying him. They didn’t use him as transport anymore – Cy was having the child save his energy for something else.

_Rabbit!_ Leeland signed it excitedly, pointing out the window of their late morning bus. When neither of his caretakers paid attention, he shoved the image of roly-poly bunnies into their minds the same way he crammed carrots into his mouth at snack time.

Jono glanced out the window at the billboard next to their stoplight. It advertised the ongoing Chester County Fair at the local farm show complex, and most importantly, it promised a petting zoo put on by the local rabbit and guinea pig association. 

_Rabbit! Rabbit!_

With a thin smile, Jono ruffled Leeland’s hair and answered, _You’re the rabbit._

Leeland blew out his cheeks. _Want rabbit! Want rabbit!_

Cy hadn’t taken note of the conversation, completely lost in his own world of paranoid surveillance. Jono gave him a nudge. 

“Take your brat to the fair. He’s been on the road a long time, mate. Deserves a break.”

Cy glanced up, out the window, and back at Jono. He fixed Leeland’s hat and tiny scarf more securely then returned to his absentminded stasis.

“Cy.”

No response.

When Jono gave Leeland an answer, he made sure he voiced it loud enough for half the bus to hear. “We’ll go see the rabbits tonight.”

If it were possible for Cy’s mood to deteriorate further, it would have. He didn’t sign a word at Jono all afternoon, pointedly ignoring him in favor of long conversations with an increasingly wiggly and distracted son. Amused by the juvenile response, Jono retaliated by painstakingly showing Leeland all the things that they could do at the fair. While he knew the sign for rabbits, the rest of the fair activities required some inventive charades alongside his hard light projector. 

By dinner, the boy was so worked up that there was nothing to be done. Off to the fair they went.

Jono felt like he’d walked into a classic movie about Good Ol’ Americana – it was so fucking picturesque. Apple pie judging contests, barbeques smoking around the corner, deep-fried monstrosities, corndogs, and funnel cake peddled by every other stand. Scarecrows, carved pumpkins, and a hayride that made him sneeze just looking at it. Here and there, a clown tried to get a giggle and a smile out of Leeland, and the boy glowered with a furious annoyance until they backed down – if they weren’t about to hand him a rabbit, they could get out of his bloody way. 

Cy disappeared in the first five minutes. Now and then Jono caught a glimpse of him through the crowd, orbiting them with care and precision. 

Finally Jono caught the earthy reek of a barn and steered Leeland through the crowd towards the animals. Far from only a rabbit display and petting zoo, every kind of farm beast had shown up for display. Rows and rows of prize-winning sheep whose prim fleece Leeland wanted to dig his grubby fingers into, long-necked alpaca with their dark glares, massive hogs gorging themselves on slop, and a small herd of rank-smelling cows with grubby udders. 

When Leeland tottered over to say hello to a small calf, a pygmy goat bolted over to try and eat his fingers through the bars. His eyes went gold, his mouth opened wide in preparation for a scream, and Jono snatched him away from the pen. 

“Rabbits!” He gave Leeland an enthusiastic shake, projecting the image since he couldn’t very well sign with his hands full of toddler. “To the rabbits!”

As soon as Jono plopped Leeland down in the rabbit enclosure, the boy lost his goddamn mind. At first he sat there shell-shocked as the rabbits shyly hopped over to investigate the newcomer, preferring the quiet one to the other screaming, running toddlers. One came all the way over to nudge at his toes. Leeland burst into tears, completely overwhelmed. When the toe-nudger hopped away, Leeland crawled in vain after him. He almost squished a different rabbit and broke into a second round of tears. Sobbing his way to the nearly-squished rabbit to apologize, he was swarmed by two more rabbits who thought his grain-gold hair was free to nibble on.

A nearby woman gave Jono a Mum Look, full of judgment and disdain. He calmly ignored her and continued filming Leeland’s meltdown on his phone. 

Leeland lay prone in the rabbit pen, giving himself over to his fate as rabbit food. It was a noble way to go. He closed his eyes and relished the tiny nudges and nibbles of the rabbit friends, then opened them to the Biggest Friend he’d ever seen in his life – a capybara staring at him from the neighboring guinea pig pen. He gasped and sat up, startling the rabbits into bolting away from him and triggering yet another round of tears.

Careful not to disturb any of the animals or other tykes, Jono stepped over the gate and sat down in the hay. Leeland immediately crawled to his lap to sob, and Jono sat him down and easily scooped up a nearby rabbit to drop in Leeland’s lap. He took the kid’s hand and slowly, soothingly stroked it over the rabbit’s fur. Little by little, child and creature alike calmed down. Leeland gently petted the bunny like his life depended on it, even as his free hand twitched at the bunny’s butt, eager to sign. 

After a few minutes, Leeland paused to grin up at Jono with tears in his eyes. 

Jono’s eyebrows shot up. Children were ungrateful; that was the way of the world. He didn’t know what to do with this. _You’re welcome,_ he signed, then tugged a second rabbit over as a distraction.

Eventually the rabbit keepers had to kick them out to be fair to the other children. By that point, Leeland was practically glowing, he had ascended to nirvana and nothing could touch him. He waved goodbye to the bunnies and let Jono carry him away from the stinky barns and back towards something vaguely more civilized.

They got a half dozen funnel cakes and sat on a bench to watch the crowd. Leeland kept pointing at the Ferris Wheel in the distance, signing _big_ and then holding up a round loop of funnel cake. Jono plucked it from his fingers and laid it on his own head like a halo, keeping a straight face as Leeland giggled and reached up on tiptoe to try and reclaim it. 

As he nibbled on the last powdered bits, Leeland paused and looked up. If Jono didn’t know better, he’d swear the boy had heard something. A moment later and Leeland went back to licking sugar off his fingers. 

Jono would have gladly taken a non-teleporting toddler on the Ferris Wheel, but right now it seemed too much like tempting fate. Or tempting some snarly retribution from a hair-trigger Cy. He’d pass.

They headed to the carnival games next. Awed by the bright colors and flashing lights, Leeland happily failed at every game before dragging Jono on to the next one. Cy’s quarters actually came in handy for once. They shot water pistols into the mouths of cowboys, tried to pop balloons with blunted darts, and tossed glittery rings towards the necks of bottles. It wasn’t until Leeland watched another child walk away with a 4-foot stuffed dog that he realized the prizes weren’t just for decoration.

He turned to Jono with a mission in his small eyes. 

Luckily, there were games specially made for the littlest guests, games that were impossible to lose. The one with the best prizes was an electronic fishpond with a hundred fish, their mouths clacking open and closed as they rotated around the ring. Jono bought Leeland three tries and passed him the smallest rod, careful to help him hold it over the pond without going tumbling in himself. 

From a green fish, Leeland won a set of unicorn-themed temporary tattoos. He sent Jono an exuberant image of his dad with a horse tattoo on his cheek. 

From a red fish, Leeland won a squirt gun of his very own. It would never make it home with them. Jono would make sure.

From a black fish, Leeland won a silver token that shimmered in the light. The worker pointed to the wall of stuffed animals, showing them the medium-sized prize range. No 4-foot new family members, thank god, but a bunch of long snakes and spaghetti-armed fuzzy monkeys. Leeland picked out an orange slinky monkey and clutched it lovingly to his chest.

It had been a while since Jono spotted Cy, and he’d noted an arcade setup in one of the larger temporary pavilions. That would be their next destination. He let Leeland run on ahead as he strolled through the crowd, never letting the kid out of his sight.

One of the candy floss sellers stopped Leeland just outside the arcade pavilion, offering the child a blue-and-pink cloud of sugar. He looked like a kid on his first job fresh out of high school, too tall for his childish face and not yet grown into his height. He’d woven his dark hair with bits of gold ribbon in celebration of the fair’s spirit. He was also, Jono realized, conversing with his tiny customer in ASL.

Leeland stared at him and clutched at his ears, dropping his orange monkey. The teen bent down to pick it up and offered it back to Leeland with a smile.

Alarm bells sounded in Jono’s head, yet he still didn’t read any sort of threat into the kind-eyed cotton candy seller. It wasn’t until Leeland glanced back to him in sheer terror that he realized something was very, very wrong. 

Jono pushed through the rest of the crowd to get back to Leeland, sweeping the child up into his arms. “Sorry mate, not in the mood for candy floss—”

Baffled, the worker looked over his shoulder for help. Another man, scruffy and blond and only a bit older than Jono himself, stepped out from behind a nearby stand. He wore a jacket, black and gold, with an unmistakable X on it.

The world tilted all at once.

Leeland clamped his hands tighter over his ears, screaming inside and outside the hivemind alike. The cotton candy salesman’s face twitched into something more soothing, something wrong, the way a shapeshifter would fiddle with bones under skin. Jono took a step away and tripped backwards into a gruff biker, losing his grip on the toddler, who panicked and flashed away into nothing. The blond mutant shouted _Leeland!_ and pushed forward to grab Jono by the collar of his leather jacket.

He was familiar, somehow, even amid the screaming telepathic static in Jono’s head. It was the southern twang to his words as he screamed at Jono that made him sure.

Jono could blast him off with his hard light projector; instead he threw up his hands. “I’m not who I look like,” he swore, “You have to—”

Something slammed into the mutant’s lower back, sending them both sprawling. A rough hand grabbed Jono’s and hauled him onward, but by the time Jono properly got his feet under him, Cy had split back into the crowd. He ran. 

Screaming filled the air behind them as the carnival plunged into darkness, attractions stopped with their riders trapped midair. Someone kept shouting commands. Some _thing_ was following Jono through the shadows, golden eyes peering at him from every angle. He couldn’t lose it.

In his head, he saw a funnel cake ring.

Jono made a U-turn around the carousel, leaping the gate only to leap back the other way in a blind hope those serpentine shadows would tangle themselves. The moment he reached the Ferris Wheel, Cy and Leeland popped into view, grabbing him from the pavement and disappearing in a flash.

The carnival fell dark and silent.

“This is Cannonball. Mission failed. I repeat: Mission failed.”

  


* * *

  


A few weeks after baby Leeland had arrived into their world, Dr. McCoy brought the New Mutants in for a check-up. While Leeland’s health was monitored on a daily basis, he wanted to ensure there had been no accidental transmode exposures or unregulated radiation buildup for his caregivers. They were clean. 

“Now, there is one last thing I wanted to confirm with you. Although young Leeland is preternaturally sturdy for a humanoid infant, please do not forget he is still, against all appearances, an infant. He is not to be strapped to backpacks during vigorous games of football, be it American or Brazilian. He is not to be taken into the airspace under any circumstances until he is at least a year and a half of age. Not carried, not riding a Pegasus, not blasted, nothing.” Hank rubbed his paws over his face. “I realize you are a flight-intensive team, but please. Moira’s notes made clear that his brain chemistry and intercranial stability are absolutely unknown variables.”

“Noted, sir. I reckon we can follow that no problem.” 

Sam was a liar.

It wasn’t even a week later when he took a screaming Leeland for a midnight walk, carrying him out into the fields behind the Xavier mansion. They all knew that eventually they’d have to let Leeland scream himself to sleep, that he couldn’t rely on them to come and dote on him every single time or he’d end up as spoiled as a certain rich teammate. For now, that day was far off. When the lights went off and Leeland was alone in his room, he’d scream as if he were alone in the universe, and Sam couldn’t bear it.

“Your dads and I grew up here.” The rest of the team always gently teased Sam for talking to the baby so much, but he couldn’t help it. He’d done the same with all his younger siblings. “Used to be a little pond, Uncle Berto wanted to skinnydip all the time. I would only go when it got dark. That’s how we met your Da. The girls were all havin’ a slumber party and we were starwatching in our birthday suits.” 

The infant’s eyes glowed golden in the darkness, always did. He gradually quieted down as Sam spoke, lulled by the deep vibrations of his chest, though his eyes were wide and awake as ever.

Sam pointed up to the starry sky, angling the baby until he was able to look upwards as well. “Saw a shooting star that night. You always gotta wish on ‘em, Lee. It’s real important.” He brushed back a few stray locks of the child’s wispy hair. “Course, that time was your Da. Crashed right in our pond. I thought it was a comet, hauled it right out and back to the mansion to show the ladies. Never figured it was a piece of space comin’ to say hello.”

He waved hello to Leeland, then gently took his hand to help him make a wave as well. Sam never much helped with the baby sign lessons, too scared of getting it wrong. Only once the boy was a little older and had his foundations down pat would Sam give it a try. He wouldn’t wreck a kid’s speaking with his own poor attempts. Paige had given him enough grief once she decided to learn how to _speak correctly_ as a girl.

“Always dreamed of stuff like that. I know Doug did too – your human Da. Space adventures, NASA, all that. Wanted to see the stars and your alien Da made damn sure we did.” Sam gave Leeland a big smacking kiss on the forehead, grinning when Leeland giggled back. Golden eyed and always smiling, that’s all Sam wanted for him. “He ain’t around right now. I guess that makes it my job.”

It wasn’t often that the X-Men asked their Cannonball to make a gentle takeoff, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t. For all the troubles Sam used to have with aim and acceleration, he’d grown into it just as well as he’d grown into his gawky height. He took off with a whisper, holding Leeland close to his chest and watching the boy’s face the entire time. Dr. McCoy said the child’s vision was developing like a human infant’s, and Sam knew from his siblings that things like depth and focus would take a few months to mature. On the other hand, he was a Technarch, and Warlock had far more than the one lowly visual sense of normal humans. 

Sam stopped one mile up, high enough that it was only them and the vastness of space above. “You’re human, Lee. But you’re stars ‘n spacedust too. I don’t want you to miss out on your other home.”

Leeland hadn’t made a sound since they took off. His golden eyes widened ever futher as if mapping the whole of the heavens. 

“I hope your Da comes back someday. He’ll show you better’n anyone. But until then…you get lonely, you want to scream at something, you want to go home… I won’t say no. Ever.” Sam took a breath. “I let your dads down, Lee. Got them hurt, got them killed. A promise to keep you safe ain’t got a lot of meaning from me. But by God, I won’t fail you, too.”

Sam was so goddamn tired of being a liar. 

He sank his head into his hands, unable to meet Warlock’s eyes after the botched mission – with Warlock serving as airplane, that meant not looking anywhere at all. Sam needed a gym and a boxing sandbag, a long flight through isolated airspace where no one would hear him scream, or a punch bowl of straight bourbon whiskey. He’d had Leeland in his sights, had even greeted the boy over the usual hivemind wavelength, and still lost him in the end. 

Worse yet, he’d seen Doug in the flesh. The man looked like he’d been living on the streets for the past four months, a mess of scruff and dirt, and it killed Sam to know they’d left him like that. How long had they prayed for Doug to get another chance, only to leave him in the gutter in a daze. But Leeland looked fine. Taller, maybe, in clothes that didn’t perfectly fit anymore, but he’d looked happy and healthy before the plan tailspun out into disaster. And there was a third person traveling with them, a blue-skinned miniature Apocalypse who acted like he knew Sam and spoke in a heavy British accent. 

If anyone else had been traveling with them, Sam could get his frustration out through a roundtable discussion, hashing out what they’d seen and trying to make sense of it. It was only him and Warlock, and Warlock hadn’t spoken a word since Leeland turned that panicked look of bone-deep fear on them. Sam had never been the best at words; asking him to reassure Warlock, himself, and the team all at once was exhausting on a good day, and this was nowhere near a good day. First they’d almost met a catastrophic end against Cameron Hodge’s forces, then he’d barely dragged a new ragtag team through Limbo’s clutches, and now he couldn’t even manage to bring his nephew home. 

Sam’s phone buzzed at his side. He grabbed it and hurriedly opened the message when he saw who it was from: Pete Wisdom. They’d worked together recently enough that Sam still had the number, so he’d sent off a brief “Blue + Mutant + British???” request for information. 

**[Probably Jono Starsmore. Goes by Decibel now. Walked out on the Apoc Family and been in the wind ever since.]**

“Query: New lead?” Warlock asked quietly, even though Sam knew he’d probably read the incoming message during transmission. 

Sam swiped back to his other messages. “ID on our mystery man.” He tugged off his gloves so he could text faster. “He dated my sister.”

**[Paige, you still in touch with your ex?]**


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Forgot the illustrations in the chapter 7 -- they're all in now!)

Cy brought them deep into the woods of a state park, breaking off from the RV campgrounds to forge his own path into the brush. Only once they were entirely off the grid and without any crowds for enemies to hide in did he finally release his iron grip on Leeland’s small body and let them both breathe.

No one had said a word since the encounter with the X-Men. Admittedly, only Jono was capable of speech, but the silence sat as syrupy-thick as that creature from the shadows, as sharp-toothed and vicious as it clawed away at his very last nerve. He kept his hands in his pockets and his phone shaking in his sweaty, white-knuckled grip. 

He wasn’t stupid. You might walk away from the X-Men, but you couldn’t _fight_ them. Cy had marked Jono out as a fellow instigator. Sam Vigilante-Strike-Force Guthrie had caught Apocalypse-lite with a runaway mutant baby. All the island commune mugs had just been through the wringer and wouldn’t stop to ask why. 

He should call. He should’ve called in the beginning, grudges notwithstanding. It was far too late now. No one would listen. He wasn’t even a mutant. And how many times had the X-Men been taken over – was that shadow creature controlling them? All Jono had to work with was gut and instinct, and he didn’t much trust a gut that had been blown out and reformed as often as his. 

A deer plunged through the bushes a few yards ahead, and Leeland burst into frantic tears. One last nerve, snapped.

Jono pushed forward and unzipped the Hylian shield pack hanging from Cy’s back, rummaging until he found the stuffed red rabbit they’d stowed there. He tucked it into Leeland’s arms and yanked the little one’s jacket hood down over his eyes. 

“Here you go, rabbit,” he spat with pointed venom. Only one person in range to hear him, after all. “Guess you’re not made for the outdoorsy bullshit your da dragged us into. Feeling’s fuckin’ mutual.” 

They forded streams, skirted mountainsides, and stepped in bear shit, all because Cy couldn’t understand that not everyone’s bodies could cunningly turn off those inconvenient pain receptors. Jono ached with such intensity he might have mistaken it for another furnace, bone and joint and muscle all joined in the tragic agony of a city slicker. Still, none of it compared to the bone-deep unrest in Leeland’s eyes when he bothered to open them. He tossed and turned in waking and in sleep, ever moving, as though the only thing they ever fed him was their own anxiety. Some trail mix.

On the fourth day, they passed near enough to a forest ranger post that Jono’s phone buzzed in his pocket, eagerly connecting to a fleeting glimpse of the outside world. 

**[We need to talk. – Paige]**

Jono wasn’t sure what was worse, her nerve at deciding when and where they’d finally speak to each other again, the way she signed her text as if her number wasn’t programmed into every phone he’d owned in the last six years, or the fact that Sam had stooped to using his sister to do his own dirty work. The scathing response he plugged in when Cy was distracted investigating wild berries wouldn’t send, so he let it sit until they tiptoed close enough to get signal again. Before he got the chance to send it over, a new text came through.

**[Call me when you’re alone. Please, Jono. Something’s not right.]**

The problem was context; that clever girl had probably planned it that way. Maybe she meant the situation on his end, or maybe, just maybe, she meant something was wrong on her end and she was reaching out to him for help. He wouldn’t know unless he called. He couldn’t call until they’d emerged from the woods a hundred years later like fairy folk. 

He looked up to find Cy watching him expectantly.

“Hate to break it to you, mate, but your gremlin’s never going to be potty-trained if he can only shit in a bush.” Jono kept his hands in his pockets as he offered a casual shrug, phone obscured well out of sight. 

Like clockwork, Cy turned away with a scowl. 

In the evening, Jono sat on the edge of the campfire and pulled out his guitar like usual. They’d swung by the motel on their flight out of civilization, a panicked five minutes of packing the diaper bag and grabbing Jono’s things, and every night since, Jono had lulled the kid into a faint normalcy by playing some quiet tunes. Leeland would sit in Jono’s lap, snug between chest and guitar, and watch Jono’s fingers move across the strings below. If it wasn’t the rumble of the instrument, it was the rumble of Jono’s soft singing that lifted away his fears, if only for a little while.

The kid was in rotten shape, and only an utter cockhead would take advantage of that. Or a bastard with no other options. Jono needed to get rid of Cy for an hour or two so he could phone in, and at this point only Leeland could shake his father’s resolve.

“Fuck,” he swore under his breath, just loud enough for Cy to hear over the feeble fire he’d kindled. “Where’s my damn—fucking hell.”

Cy glanced over.

“Must’ve dropped my last plec somewhere.” He’d flicked it into the bushes miles back, a few minutes after Paige’s last text. He kept rummaging as he force fed frustration toward Leeland’s empathic channels. 

The kid knew something was wrong. He picked up the guitar by himself, a colossal feat, and tried to shove it into Jono’s hands to solve the problem.

_Music!_

Jono gently pushed the guitar away. Braced himself. This was so much worse than taking candy and rabbits away from a baby.

_No music, Little Bee. Music broken._

Three, two, one. The knowledge sank in. And the tears began.

Cy watched his son’s hysterics with calm appraisal, leaving Jono to be the one to pick the boy up and hum a frantic lullaby, to jostle the child on his hip, on his lap, to sing louder and grin wider and twist his little hands out of their fists. It didn’t work. The child simply refused to be soothed. It was guitar or bust, and Jono announcing that it was broken had toppled the precarious block tower of Leeland’s already battered universe. Even the stuffed rabbit didn’t quiet him a bit. The whole world was a monster out to get him and he’d lost his only shield against the dark.

Jono raked a hand through his hair. “Look, drop me off near town and I’ll snag a pack. Won’t take more than a few hours. Otherwise we’re shit out of luck here.”

Instead of even trying to answer, Cy began to wander away from camp, likely off to try his hand at hunting again. Thankfully he hadn’t managed to catch anything thus far; the thought of him bringing back a rabbit with a snapped neck sent a prickle down Jono’s spine. 

Jono waved a hand in demonstration, desperate to distract from more violent pursuits. “Look. I can’t fingerpick, my nails are fucked. I need a plec. And some smokes. And the kid needs food you didn’t find in the swamp.”

Scowling, Cy signed back that they were far too north to encounter any traditional swamps. Jono barely understand a word of it. 

“Cy.”

_In the morning,_ he threw at Jono, hands sharp and precise as though handling something he didn’t want to touch. Before Jono could say anything in return, Cy disappeared into the darkness. 

Enough was enough. Smarmy bastard had left Jono with his screaming kid in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. He’d probably gone on another mysterious reconnaissance run. Either he’d turn up with maps and bus passes and newly forged passports, or reappear with blood-soaked clothes in the early dawn without a word of explanation. All those times he’d supposedly gotten hit by cars, all the blood Jono had assumed was his own – Jono didn’t really know, in the end. The blind devotion to his son had wavered as well; did he simply trust Jono’s intentions, or was he glad to have found a patsy to take the work off his hands? 

“I’ve got you, rabbit.” He couldn’t do much with Leeland in his arms, one hand still rubbing the sobbing child’s trembling back, so he tucked the boy’s head under his chin and hummed a lower tune. Only the kid mattered. Whatever Paige had to say, whatever Cy was caught up in, to hell with it. The kid needed someone with half a brain and Jono was the only one around who fit the description.

Hours later, long after Leeland finally exhausted himself and dropped into a restless sleep against Jono’s chest, Cy crept back into the camp. If it hadn’t been for the quiet regularity of his footsteps, without care or hesitation, Jono would have unleashed a full hard-light hell on the unknown intruder. Instead, he cracked an eye at Cy, made sure he wasn’t lugging any dead animals, and drifted back to a light sleep.

Leeland’s soft giggles woke Jono up again a little past dawn. He cracked his shoulder and winced at the knot in his back. When you’d been around for as much mutant bullshit as he had, you’d earned an actual mattress to sleep on for the rest of your days, not a log. Or the sun in your eyes at the arse crack of dawn. Or ants in your duffel.

He stood, lifted his foot, and froze in place as Leeland gave a sharp scream.

While he’d slept, someone had drawn a complex map into the dry dirt of their campsite. It took him a moment to get his bearings, realizing he was looking at it all upside-down, but soon enough he recognized the elongated beans of the Great Lakes and the misshapen dick of Long Island. 

Look, geography of the colonies wasn’t his strong suit, okay? He knew they were still in Pennsylvania, but who really knew where Pennsylvania was. Honestly.

Here and there sat bottle caps and stones marking unidentifiable locations. Only the pile of colorful leaves pinned down over NYC made any sense. Cy was pondering, drawing, pondering, and drawing all over again somewhere slightly to the north. He seemed transfixed, full of some of his former energy instead of running on fear and sour lemons. He’d even mapped out a tiny racecourse for Leeland to play in over the Atlantic Ocean, hence the scream – Jono had nearly squished one of his purebred racing salamanders.

“We moving out?” Jono asked from somewhere distinctly south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Cy raised his head, finger-spelled _plectrum,_ then returned to his planning. 

True to his word, once the sun hit 11 o’clock in the sky, Cy gathered them up and led them east with renewed purpose. They hopped a fence into an abandoned trainyard on the edge of the game lands, one still close to the local bus depot. Cy passed Jono his bag of quarters, gave him a few grocery requests, and sent him on his way. They’d meet back in the afternoon and catch a bus.

He’d behaved just like the baffling, kind-hearted yet prickly Cy that Jono had met weeks ago, not the shell of paranoia he’d slipped on like armor. But there was something unsettling about it. Something was coming to an end, that much Jono knew. 

Had Cy figured out his wavering would-be betrayal? His phone was still in his pocket where he’d left it the night before. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. If Cy could _talk_ to Jono’s hard-light projector, could he talk to phones and other electronics too? Still, he’d seemed brighter that morning, not angry and betrayed. Maybe he’d gotten laid by the fairy folk out under the moon. 

A 12-pack of plecs only cost Jono a fiver, but it was a long walk from the hole-in-the-wall music shop to the next grocery store ten blocks away. He fiddled with his phone in his pocket. Too risky. If Cy hadn’t chatted it up yet, that didn’t mean he couldn’t. He needed something more anonymous, and one of the ailing gas stations he kept passing had to have a secluded payphone. 

Jono would never admit that Cy’s stash of quarters had come in handy after all. After ducking into the first phone booth he could find, he took a deep, steeling breath and dialed the number.

She picked up on the third ring. “Hello, this is—”

“Paige?”

The line went quiet, and for a moment Jono thought she’d hung up on him. Then he heard a faint rasp of breath, wet and shaky, and realized what he’d done. _Idiot._ He leaned forward to rest his forehead against the cold glass of the phonebooth. 

“S-sorry, I… It’s just, I’ve never heard your voice before.” She trailed off again into tears.

Jono had known that, on some level. He hadn’t exactly tried to meet up with his former teammates after his traumatic initiation into the Blue Man Group. Running into Jubilee again had been a coincidence, and she’d never batted an eye about his voice. Now and then she’d tell him he’d lost all the mystery, or that his ventriloquism was getting rusty, but it hadn’t been….this.

The worst part, as Jono stood there miles away, listening to a girl he loved cry herself hoarse over a simple phone call, was that part of him didn’t even care. Loving her was exhausting. It didn’t mean he’d stopped; it did mean it was hard to remember, some days.

“That why you wanted me to call?” He tried for a lighter, teasing tone. Even to his own ears it sounded like he was gritting his teeth. He just didn’t want to deal with crying at the moment. 

She wiped at her face, sending a weird kind of snuffle over the line. “Shut up. God. Your humor hasn’t improved, so I guess that means it’s really you.”

Jono lifted his head away from the glass and let it bang down against it instead. “Look, I wasn’t _trying_ to run from your brother, bloke’s grown into a quarterback and Cy doesn’t wait to ask questions—” If Sam had looked like that when he and Paige were almost dating, a brick wall of takes-no-shit intensity, he’d have hightailed it to another planet by now. 

“You took his son.”

What.

“…Jono?”

There was no way. The kid looked exactly like his father – well, as much as any kid did when they were half freckle and half pudge – and neither one of them looked like a Guthrie. He knew Guthries. Blond, sure, but he knew plenty of blondes (whose names all ended with Guthrie, fuck). Farm freckles. That he could see. The foreheads? No, there wasn’t nearly enough forehead there – not tall enough, either, unless the height would come from Sam’s side in time and Cy was just the second set of genes. Which, okay, X-Men, science-y bullshit happened all the time, but unless there were new and personal developments on Sam’s side, nothing made any fucking sense.

“Jono, are you still there?”

“I think I’d know a Guthrie if I saw one,” he snapped as if he hadn’t spent the last two minutes having a panic. 

“It’s—complicated.”

Fucking custody disputes. “So he _isn’t_ Sam’s.”

“Yes and no.” She took a deep breath and shuffled through something. Had she prepped index cards? “Listen. The important thing is you and everyone with you get to the X-Men as soon as possible.”

“Not happening without an explanation, sunshine.”

“Can you just trust me for once?”

(His silence told her all she needed to know, and tears prickled once more at the corners of her eyes. No matter. He was just confused. He’d come around. Sam was depending on her to see this through.)

“Okay, okay. I don’t know what Doug’s told you, so I’ll start at the beginning—”

“Doug?”

“Yes?” Paige waited a long minute for his question before realizing that had been it. “Wait. Who do you think you’re traveling with?”

Jono frowned against the receiver. “His name’s Cy.” _No access. Illegal setup._ They’d been traveling together for so long that Jono had honestly forgotten. “Doesn’t remember his name, said he couldn’t access it or something. I call him Cy. The little one’s named Leeland.”

There was another pause, and Jono got the distinct feeling that she was pinching her nose at him on the other end of the line. 

“That’s Doug Ramsey, you moron.” He could tell she was trying to rein herself in, but from her tone alone, he felt truly judged for not reading the complete compendium of X-Men trainee logs that she had studied like her Bible. “Cypher? From my brother’s old team? How could you call him Cy and not know that?”

“It’s short for cyborg,” he offered petulantly. “And why should I care if he’s from your brother’s—”

“Because he’s _dead,_ Jono.” 

She didn’t pause for effect; his brain did that for her. A soft-eyed, tattered young man with his head cracked open and black sludge where his blood should be, walking barefoot halfway across the country because he didn’t know any better. Because he couldn’t feel a thing. Because all he knew was protecting the small mutant child in his charge, so every part of him was expendable. 

“He’s been dead for eight years. It’s kind of a big deal.” 

Hell, he’d been dead for four years and the first thing he’d done with a living body was go buy a pack of smokes. Not kidnap a child and go on the lam in a world he couldn’t process and didn’t understand. 

“Jono?”

“Still here.” He sounded distant; felt it, too. “Processing the eldritch child custody case. How’s the kid fit?”

“Cypher was always…um, fond, of one of their teammates.” Jono swore she used air quotes. “An alien teammate. I didn’t really learn the whole story until later, but…remember how I met Monet and the others? When the Phalanx snatched us? That was the alien, kind of. Sam says there were always scientists messing around with his alien pal’s remains, made him angry as hell that they could never get all the pieces back. Sometimes people made weapons or monsters, and sometimes they made, well.”

“…Kids.”

“They salvaged a batch years back. Didn’t think anything would ever come of it until Dr. McCoy decided to grow a baby from the lot. Sam’s raised that kid like his own, they all have. You should see how hard he tries to sign with his big clumsy hands. Broke his heart when the kid got snatched from his crib.” She sighed. “Broke it twice when they realized who did it.”

Jono wasn’t stupid, he’d always known there was something different about Lee, something more than being a mutant. He still seemed far too well-adjusted for a lab experiment. Cy—Doug?—was a different case entirely.

“Two problems with your story. First, the kid’s bloody terrified of you people. Second, dead men don’t just wake up and snatch kids from their cribs.”

The line went silent. Jono thought he’d caught her in a lie – a kid didn’t scream at his would-be father unless something was very wrong.

“This year, they do.”

“They? Haven’t seen any other zombie dads roaming the land.”

“Not…dads,” Paige said carefully. It was her brownnoser voice, the one she used to tiptoe around teachers while simultaneously winning them to her side. “Mutants. The Black Queen brought back an army, and as far as we can tell only Cypher managed to escape.”

An army of dead mutants meant psychological warfare. She didn’t want to talk about it, or—no. She didn’t want to talk about it with _him._

He fumbled for his lighter, hands shaking as he lit up a cigarette and raised it to his lips. He could hear her quiet breathing over the line, knew she hadn’t gone anywhere.

She should’ve called.

(…He should’ve called.)

“Did you, uh—” He sounded like he had sandpaper in his throat, like he’d already wrecked his new lungs. _Cy would kill me,_ he thought idly, somewhere amid the white noise of his brain.

“Only afterward. I looked through the security tapes until I found them. I had to be sure.” 

A few more precious minutes of existence for his two best friends, the record waiting in the X-Men’s hands. It was too convenient a lure to bring him in and too bitter to be a trap. Emma wouldn’t do that to them. Sam wouldn’t have Paige call to offer something like that. He knew these people – strangers one and all, but at the end of the day he knew where they’d draw the line. Outsiders always knew.

“Let’s say I believe you.” Paige sucked in a breath, ready to argue. Jono beat her to it. “I still won’t hand them over. They’re terrified for a reason.”

“Honest to God, Jono. No one here knows why. The New Mutants have been tracking them for months, and every time they get close, Leeland ports them away. We don’t have any teleporters as fast as he is.”

So they really had been on the run for months. It explained Cy’s paranoia, his reluctance to separate them or use Leeland’s abilities unnecessarily. What he didn’t understand was why no one had realized someone was with them, how they thought Cy could possibly be the mastermind when he could barely remember how to make PB&J for his kid. 

“You telling me Nightcrawler can’t keep up with a toddler?”

“…Jono, if you stayed in the goddamn loop we wouldn’t be in this mess,” she snapped, voice cracking. Bloody hell.

He took another drag on his cigarette. “Got booted from the obituary mailing list a while back.”

“Please come home.”

Funny how she thought his home was a place he’d never been with people who’d never given a shit. Or maybe she just meant wherever _she_ was.

“Tell your brother that something’s wrong with his friend. He’s ten marbles short of a rugby match, if you get the drift. He signs with the kid and can do his whole tech-whisperer thing, which I fucking hope is his power, because other than that he’s good as mute. Some of his senses are fucked too – I don’t think he really feels pain. All he sees is his kid. We’re heading north. I don’t know where. That’s all I’ve got.”

“…Thank you,” Paige said, as if it was enough.

  


* * *

  


At precisely 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, the doorbell rang at the Ramsey residence. 

Sheila was not a skittish, weepy woman. She was a defense attorney for god’s sake, keeping an even keel was the foundation of her entire life. She had weathered the death of her only child as well as a raft in a hurricane and still come out the other side intact, and the bitter divorce that followed had barely affected her. She organized, she planned, she accomplished. She filled her time. She served on so many advisory boards and legal teams that her email signature took up an entire page if she didn’t remember to trim it accordingly. She never stopped moving.

Until the day a SHIELD agent turned up at her door. At first Sheila thought she’d stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and was to be hauled off into the night, never to be seen again. But the woman at the door was so young, only as old as her son would’ve been, though the lines etched around her eyes proved her weary enough for such a serious job indeed.

Agent Blevins informed her that she was not there on official business and had only been requested to deliver a message by their mutual acquaintance, whom she could not name. Said acquaintance desired to speak with Mrs. Ramsey and could not do so over the phone nor in person for the time being. The agent could not say why. She could not say what the message regarded. All she was authorized to offer was her own personal phone number: once a meeting was viable, she would call Sheila to confirm a time and date. If she was amenable, of course.

Sheila took the number.

For three weeks there had been no word. If not for the business card pinned to her refrigerator with a magnet, she’d almost have thought she imagined the whole thing. But if they needed such secrecy, then they must be a mutant, and she could never turn down the chance to help.

Finally, late one night in September, she received a call from the same young woman as before. The date was sudden, the time non-negotiable. Sheila rescheduled all her appointments. It made her feel almost adventurous. 

Until the doorbell rang and a suffocating dread crept into her heart. 

Sheila peeked out through the kitchen blinds, hoping the elderly stranger on her front porch wouldn’t glance her way. Her stomach churned unhappily as if it recognized the man before the rest of her caught up. He was familiar in a way she couldn’t place – older than her by far, with a heavier weight on his shoulders than she had ever seen. He had taken off his coat and draped it over one arm, smoothing down the folds in a nervous tic she recognized from her cross-examinations. Everything about him was soft and sad and wrong, and that’s when it clicked.

On TV, he only ever looked sharp and angry. The last time she’d shaken his hand, cold platitudes had fallen from his mouth, as lifeless as the body in the coffin beside them.

And here he was with the gall to look—

Well, she wasn’t going to dignify it with the word ‘repentant.’

When she opened the door, he put on a charming smile and opened his mouth for whatever speech he’d been planning.

“So what should I call you?” Sheila snapped. Her remaining sense of self-preservation screamed an alarm, yet she forged onward without care. “Michael Xavier? Erik Lehnsherr? _Magneto?”_

He didn’t flinch. Instead, a slow grin spread across his face, and his hands finally stopped fidgeting. “My dear, you may call me anything you wish. I think you have earned that right.”

Sheila could think of plenty of words for the man who let her son die and she said not a one. It had been eight years. More than anything else, she needed to know what he had to say.

“May I come in?”

He seemed surprised to find her house decorated with modernist artwork on every wall and family photos nowhere to be found. If he’d expected to find a shrine to her son, he’d be disappointed. She had a life to live for the both of them.

Sheila led him into the kitchen to offer him a seat and tea. She didn’t feel unsafe, per se, with an on-again-off-again terrorist sitting across from her, but she did feel safer with a pot of boiling water on the stove nearby.

Magneto folded his hands on top of the table, looking to all the world like a guilty man who’d tasted remorse and turned it down. “I know you have questions, ones you have always deserved the answers to. I regret misjudging you all those years ago.”

She held up a hand. “No. No apologies for that. I know who I was married to.” A man who favored his pride over his son, his conscience, and all semblance of logic, too angry at an imagined enemy to ever be angry at himself. When he’d found out the school fostered mutants, he’d never made the obvious leap to realizing his son had been one. Instead, he went straight for the Kool-Aid and wrote a manifesto about how the muties killed his son. 

“If you held your tongue to protect my son’s decision, then I cannot fault you for it.” At least not anymore. Some pain she’d had to let go of just to keep breathing. 

The smile Magneto gave her was far too strange to make sense of. Amused, like a professor discovering his favorite student had read ahead of the syllabus, and knowing, too, as though there was a second round of puzzle pieces that she hadn’t thought to look for. She wondered if her name had ever crossed his desk out of the blue, if she’d ever defended one of his people without realizing. If they’d helped each other and she’d never known.

“So be it,” he said, accepting the tea when she offered it. “I had planned to start from the beginning, but you are as clever as your son. I see now where Douglas got it from. Let us start at the end.”

Magneto glanced down at his tea, swirling it in his cup as though interrogating it for answers. “Your son is alive and on the run.”

She didn’t move. She hadn’t frozen, unable to process his words – her heart simply refused to beat until he broke it once more with a _but._

He didn’t.

“One of our enemies raised an army of our fallen to use against us, your son among them. Douglas appears to have outsmarted her and made his escape, yet he didn’t come to us. In fact, he avoids mutants at great cost. The X-Men believe he is part of a remaining trap. I believe otherwise.”

Magneto leaned towards her, voice dropping to little more than a whisper. “I believe he is running on instinct. I believe he is hurt and scared. And when a man is that frightened, be he eight or eighty, the only person in the world he wants is his mother.”

“You’re wrong.” Sheila heard the words, barely registering they had come out of her own mouth. “He never—I never gave him reason to trust me, he never said a word. He wouldn’t come now, with even higher stakes.”

“Then it may well be the feeble ramblings of an old man.” He smiled again, the first semblance of a real one she’d seen thus far. “But I will answer your questions while we wait. There is quite the tale to tell, after all.”

“Very well.” Sheila finally picked up her own cup of tea, eying him steadily through the faint steam. This was her home, her courtroom. Even he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. On a normal day she’d go straight for the jugular; now, with the fallout of an emotional bombshell at her heels, she could admit to a certain taste for blood.

“You may begin your statement. Let us hope it doesn’t fall to pieces during cross.”


	9. Chapter 9

They continued due north, as if Cy knew that was what Jono had told Paige and didn’t want to prove him a liar. Cy still pulled them through woods and parks when he could get away with it, forging a zigzagging path between bus routes and public blind spots, but he made sure to keep Leeland fed, warm, and dry. When they happened by playgrounds, Cy always stopped and let Leeland play, even if they could only spare fifteen minutes. Jono would push him on the swing again and again until the whispering suburban mums thought they were both mad, screaming and laughing like wild things.

Jono watched the signs for New York City whip by outside the bus windows and wondered where Cy was taking them. They were surely close – a weight had dropped from Cy’s shoulders as if nothing could trouble him anymore, and he watched Jono with a new clarity of purpose if not mind. In fact, if Cy wasn’t watching his son, it was rare to find him looking at anything other than Jono.

It made watching _him_ in return awfully difficult. Jono kept trying to wrap his head around everything that Paige had said, trying to fit the name _Doug_ to the man sitting across from him. She hadn’t actually told him very much at all, index cards forgotten when they slammed headlong into the recent casualty list, and he’d kept his mobile phone turned off ever since. 

So what the hell did “fond of his alien teammate” mean?

Listen, Jono had a healthy imagination and he wasn’t a saint. He wanted to know. The kid was human-shaped, so his other parent couldn’t be too different. Jono turned an eye to Leeland, since he had an excuse for watching the kid while he’d get caught out for sizing up Cy. What was different about him? The freckles? The teleporting? He’d assumed that was his mutant ability, though all those glowing lights had to be involved somehow too. Overly attuned to rabbits?

They booked a room at a small motel overlooking the Hudson River, close enough to the shoreline that they could walk down and have an afternoon picnic. The beach was too rocky for bare feet, and Leeland kept wailing over the way he sloshed in his sneakers as he chased minnows along the shore. He’d end up with his father’s feet if they let him have his way. 

To distract him, Cy pointed to a particularly large fish and began to teach Leeland all about salmon swimming against the tide to go back where they came from. 

_Fish go home?_

Cy smiled gently and glanced at Jono, waiting for his second student to catch up.

Jono sighed and gave it some thought. While Leeland had never known anything else, Jono kept stumbling between languages, having to carefully plan what he could say with the words that he had. _Yes. Fish go home. Make baby fish._ He ‘swam’ a hand out far enough to poke Leeland on the nose, earning a giggle. 

The more Jono paid attention, the more enraptured Leeland became by the new knowledge. Never in his life had Jono been the model student, but he’d do anything to keep Leeland curious and engaged like that.

In the evening, Cy pushed all their remaining money into Jono’s pockets and sent him down the street to a quiet diner. He came back with five hot meals and a slice of blueberry pie for dessert. He didn’t anticipate a purple-mouthed gremlin stubbornly avoiding his toothbrush for the rest of the night. Only by threatening to withhold their scheduled jam session did he finally get Leeland to stand still long enough to scrub up.

They never had an audience when Jono played for Leeland. Jono busked; Cy drifted. That was the deal. But that night, Cy settled down cross-legged in front of them and even had a song request: play the same song twice. Simple enough.

Jono rolled on into the encore without pause, and as soon as he hit the first line, Cy’s hands leapt to life. Jono couldn’t understand most of it – doubted Leeland could, either – but he recognized the very same rhythm he was playing himself. Cy’s hands sang along to the beat in a lullaby that took both of them to perform, and Leeland’s eyes were so wide and bright.

_**And if a double-decker bus**_  
_**Crashes into us**_  
_**To die by your side**_  
_**Is such a heavenly way to die**_  
_**And if a ten ton truck**_  
_**Kills the both of us**_  
_**To die by your side**_  
_**Well the pleasure, the privilege is mine**_

_**Oh, there is a light and it never goes out**_  
_**There is a light and it never goes out**_

Jono cut off a few lines early, choking back a laugh at Cy’s besotted expression. “Christ, Cy, pick something family friendly. I wouldn’t sing that if he could hear.”

Cy blinked as though he’d sung something as innocent as _the wheels on the bus go round and round._ He considered it for a moment.

_Then play something more interesting._

“Piss off,” Jono grinned, not even bothering to hide his laugh this time. 

In the morning, Cy took them on a local bus into the middle of east coast suburbia. It had one of those picture-perfect downtown areas where the cars were barred, the dogs were plentiful, and the weekly farmers market was advertised on every street corner. He never stopped to map their route, leading them on with utter certainty about which way they were going. When they passed into green and shady rows of landscaped lawns and expensive houses, Jono let Leeland tuck himself into Jono’s leather jacket for a nap. Though the neighbors might let two ruffians pass through if they kept their pace brisk, a child could draw the wrong kind of attention here.

Next came the bright countryside avenues, pastures for thoroughbreds on one side and scattered mansions on 5-acre plots on the other. They veered off into the woods to get out from under the sun. It wasn’t a shortcut. Once again, Jono spent hours following Cy through the winding trails, but it was a far cry from the hunting preserves they’d hidden in before. Here and there they passed rickety old treehouses and rope swings long rotted. 

Just when Jono was ready to stage another mutiny, they broke through the woods into a wide, golden meadow. The scarce trees dotting the countryside had already given themselves to the reds and yellows of autumn, and off in the distance he could see lights twinkling inside a grand three-story house. Though the sun wouldn’t properly set for another hour, it hung low and red in the sky, a stark outline of fire around Cy as he stared out at the far-off house.

“Looks occupied. If you want to squat somewhere for the night, we’ll need to find another.” Jono reached out to give his shoulder a shake. 

Cy turned, eyes bright with gold as though he’d been feasting on pure sunshine. He smiled and shook his head, then reached out to rouse Leeland from his leather cocoon of slumber in Jono’s arms. Smoothing the tousled hair back from his son’s forehead, he pressed a gentle kiss to his brow. 

For a split second, Jono swore Leeland’s eyes had turned a watery gold as well, replaced the next moment with a sheen of sleepy tears. Leeland gave a grumpy flap of his hands, then reached back for his father’s cheeks to return the kiss.

Cy answered haltingly. It was the first thing Jono had ever seen him do without ease and grace, and Jono was about to tell him so when he realized Leeland had begun to cry. The boy tucked his wet face against Jono’s neck without a sound. Jono had memorized every type of tantrum – time to eat, time to nap, time to revolt against naps, time for potty, the rabbit got dirty, stressed and overwhelmed, a longing for public nudity, panicked and scared, desperate for attention and snuggles – but never had he heard the boy cry to himself, wanting no one to hear or to comfort him.

At once, Cy swung the Hyrulean backpack over Jono’s shoulder so he could rummage for the stuffed rabbit. After nearly forgetting him one time too many, they’d taken to packing him within reach in his own carrying pouch. 

“Am I the pack mule now?” Jono huffed, readjusting his baggage: the duffel on one shoulder, Leeland’s weight on the other, his guitar across his back with the diaper bag strapped on top of it. 

Cy laughed—honest to god laughed—and pushed the floppy red rabbit into Jono’s hands.

_Yes. Thank you._

An image of the same rabbit raced through his thoughts. Jono only had time to look at the boy in his arms before the whole world flickered out.

He kicked at thin air.

Yanking the boy upward as if holding him above the course of a raging river, Jono plummeted the sudden two-foot drop, his heel sliding on polished wood as the baggage dragged him backwards, guitar smacking against the sharp edge of a tableside bookcase— _fuck_ —bum knee giving out as he tried to brace himself, a piercing crack as the boards snapped under the combined weight—

Fuck. Blind. Ports.

He landed in a pile of shattered dignity, breathing hard as he clutched Leeland to his chest and tried to process what had just happened. An encyclopedia dug deep into his lower back, but if he moved an inch he’d feel the break—in his bones or his guitar. Or both. Leeland stared past him in blank confusion at the offending bookcase that had been thoroughly destroyed by their fall. Jono brushed his hands across Leeland’s head and shoulders, checking him for injury, and wondered at the betrayal in his dark eyes. He’d never botched a port before. Someone must’ve given him a bad map. 

“Sheila, stay in the—”

Jono flinched and gripped Leeland tighter to his chest, hurriedly looking around at their posh surroundings for an exit. It looked like the inside of a normal family home, albeit too fancy for normal blokes to actually live in. A place for high tea, not a doss house. It should’ve felt safe.

One problem: _Magneto_ just turned the corner into the room.

“Jonothon?” The man’s voice softened despite himself. _“Leeland?”_

He looked around as if there was a third name in his mouth, but not a third face to put it to. That’s when it clicked.

“Son of a _bitch_.” Jono scrambled to his feet, biting back the pain that shot through his leg like a firecracker. He shrugged off their bags, abandoned his guitar, and shoved the baby into Magneto’s arms before bolting out the door. 

From the porch he had a wide open view of the countryside, the very same golden fields they’d been looking at a few minutes before. But the direction was wrong. He circled the house and scanned the horizon, finally spotting a forested hilltop in the distance. Within a few feet he knew he’d never make it there on his own, yet he kept racing on with as much speed as he could muster, fingers digging into his neck as he tried to activate the hard light projector. The crash had rattled it, shaking something out of place, and it took him a good quarter of a mile to get it functional again. He hollered his way airborne, shouting scathing obscenities at Cy’s abandonment, and ran a quick loop around the woods without luck.

He’d known something was wrong, but he never thought Cy would take off to deal with it alone. Everything they’d done, they’d done together. Except for…all the times Cy had disappeared into the crowd, when Jono had assumed he was planning their route and surveilling options. But he wouldn’t ditch his kid. Maybe they hadn’t been the team Jono thought, but everything Cy did was for Leeland.

And he’d _told_ Leeland that, hadn’t he? Just like he’d told Leeland where to go. The only one who’d ever been out of the loop was Jono, the patsy they’d picked up along the way. 

The hillside was abandoned. Not even footprints marked the dirt where they’d been standing half an hour earlier. Jono hadn’t honestly expected to find anything, but on the other hand Cy was a moron. Just not when Jono needed it most. 

Also, he’d left the baby with Magneto, so he should probably go back. A Magneto who knew the baby and happened to be waiting in the middle of rich-ass suburbia. He didn’t really want answers. He just wanted to punch something, scream a bit, and put some ice on his now royally fucked up leg.

At least he could scream his way back to the house.

  


* * *

  


The team holed up in an isolated safehouse on the coast of Lake Erie. Wolverine had passed it on to the X-Men years back on one conditions: no one was to ever touch the booze aging in the basement. 

“Guys, gals, and alien pals, may I present: the Macallan M.” Roberto poured a series of six glasses with a flourish, flipping the bottle from hand to hand. Sam would never tell him so, but that bartending class they’d taken for the hell of it had _really_ paid off. 

Amara sniffed at it dubiously and pushed the cup away. “I thought you didn’t even _like_ whiskey.”

“Some of us actually know how to broaden our horizons,” Roberto sniffed. He deftly traded her cup for a blood red wine glass and slid the whiskey down towards Sam instead. A son of Kentucky would never turn it down. 

She looked him dead in the eye, reached out to pluck the fancy ice sphere from Warlock’s cup, and dropped it into her wine glass.

Roberto clapped a hand over his heart in recoil. “This—this is why Rome fell!”

“Anything?” Sam asked Dani, nudging her knee under the table. It was nice to kick back and relax after all they’d been through, but the intel Paige had passed on was eating away at him. 

“Not yet.” She glanced at the ongoing war further down the hand-carved bar table, then clinked her glass against Sam’s and took a sip. “Even with Kitty bossing him around, David hasn’t been able to spot them anywhere in New York. They might have been headed somewhere else.”

“I still think the school’s the best bet. He wouldn’t know it’s wrecked.”

“I agree, but if we go traipsing around those grounds we’ll attract attention.”

“More attention than a dead man, a blue man, and an alien baby?” he snapped. As soon as it left his mouth, he shook his head in apology and took a long drink of whiskey. Although it would’ve been a nice victory celebration drink, as a drown-your-sorrows it wasn’t his first pick. “I _hate_ this, Dani. We ain’t been sitting on our hands, but it sure as hell feels like it.”

“Every time we get close, Doug knows we’re coming and changes course. Strategically, we’re better off positioned here. We have more room to react to his misdirections.” She flicked at the fancy ice sphere in her whiskey glass, sending it twirling. “I know you want to trust Jono, but…”

Sam finished off his glass, slammed it down, and pushed away from the counter. He threw his jacket over one shoulder and headed outside without another word.

As the screen door clattered shut behind Sam, Warlock’s shoulders collapsed and his head sank down miserable to rest against the countertop. The tension in the room was the perfect icing on the cake of his inner turmoil.

Roberto sighed and handed off the bottle of whiskey to Illyana’s dubious hands. “I’ll talk to him. Someone make sure Warlock tastes that fuckin beaut, though. If a half million dollar sip of Earthjuices doesn’t cheer him up, it’s a lost cause.”

“Self is not lost cause. Addition: Earthjuices terminology inadequate, fermentedrinkables are refined in most major star systems across the—”

Illyana tossed Warlock the ice sphere from her glass and poured herself another round. 

Outside, the sun had set and the lake danced with the light of the stars and city lights alike. Roberto found Sam hunched over himself up on the bow of the Blackbird. They’d parked it behind the tree line, close enough for a quick getaway and hidden well enough from casual eyes. 

_Fair Samuel, your prince has arrived._ Roberto managed to keep the words to himself, smiling as he climbed up to join him.

Sam grunted in recognition when Roberto settled down next to him, even letting himself be manhandled into slumping against Roberto’s shoulder. Outside of Amara deigning to share body heat on the couch at winter, everyone knew Roberto was the best snuggler on the entire team. (Or had been, until Warlock returned – the title match would be saved for later.) It was easy for Sam to bury his face against Roberto’s warm neck, held close with an arm around his waist. 

“It’s my fault, I know,” Roberto rumbled at last. 

Sam shifted enough to open a questioning eye at him.

“He takes after his father.” Clenching a fist, Roberto shook it at the sky. “If only I hadn’t run away so much in my youth. I’ve tried to live a righteous life, Sam. God how I’ve tried!”

With a groan, Sam weakly pushed at his knee, torn between never moving again and throwing Roberto off the dang plane. 

Roberto pressed a grin against the back of Sam’s neck, squeezing him into a half-hug. “Come on bro, I know everything’s been shit but we’re almost through. Once it settles, I think we need a vacation, just you and me and a private beach down south. Maybe a crib for DJ. I bet you’re a total nerd for sandcastle architecture.” 

“…I promised him, Berto.”

Roberto’s voice dropped, soft and careful. “I know, Sam. But you didn’t let him down. You did all you could.”

This time, Sam did push him away, sitting up and running a hand through the mess of his hair. Roberto knew he hadn’t been sleeping well, but he looked so damn frazzled and dog-tired that it wrung Roberto’s heart every which way.

“That’s what y’all always say. None of you ever want t’think badly of me. And I appreciate that, I do, but.” Sam’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, knuckles white. “I wish even one of you was as angry as I deserve.”

“I’m exactly as angry as you deserve, dude.”

“You make excuses for me.”

Roberto frowned. “Um, no?”

“Half my team died and everyone said, well, we were just young. Ain’t it sad. Then we got proper trainin’ and—”

“Did you just call Cable’s School for Teenage Commandos ‘proper training’—”

“-And it still fuckin’ happens, Berto. I still can’t.” He rubbed at his face and stared fixedly out at the night sky. “I can’t keep any of you safe for shit. Not Shan. Not Dani. Not my own brother. But y’all still follow me to hell and back and—you _let_ me promise that kid it wouldn’t happen to him too.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. If Sam didn’t have it all out, they’d never get anywhere. He’d torn out too many stitches on too many other wounds during the botched snatch-and-grab.

As kids, they’d treated leadership as a privilege – Roberto could remember grousing to Amara over how they never got the same training that Sam and Dani did, how it wasn’t fair, how they all deserved a shot at it. It hadn’t taken long for him to realize the reins were better in Sam’s hands. Better for him, at least. Not for Sam himself.

“You done?”

Sam shrugged.

“Okay, so here’s the thing. The kid having a spook when he saw Warlock for the first time isn’t the end of the world. Who among us hasn’t run into Warlock at 3AM on the way to the bathroom and nearly peed their pants. He’s not traumatized for life. He’s off on an adventure that we’ll give him shit over for the next twenty years. This is not the end of the world.”

“But also, you’re not stupid? You’re not really worried about DJ, you’re worried about Doug. You think _he’s_ going to be angry. That he’s gonna blame you just like that shitty little voice in your head always has. So let me tell you: Doug’s always been a little bitch, but irrationally vindictive he’s not. If anyone’s gonna get an earful, it’s me. You know this. I know this. I’ve packed earplugs for this. It’s been building in his bones for eight years and his weenie heart will burst if he can’t drag me in front of the team.”

He swore Sam huffed something that was almost a laugh. Boom, progress.

“More importantly, even if he was pissed? Warlock is gonna be all over him. We won’t see Doug for two weeks, he’ll be lost in a wiggly cloud of Technarch. You ever watch those YouTube vids of soldiers coming home to their partners and dogs? I know you have, I send you the links every time. Well it’s gonna be that to the ninth degree. I’ll have to cover DJ’s eyes to preserve his innocence. The birdnarchs and the bees. We’ll draw straws but I’m telling you right now I’m not approaching that conversation even with Tom Selleck there to hold my hand and whisper sweet nothings in my ear.”

Sam’s face no longer looked like the tragic, chiseled sculpture of a tormented Wild West sheriff. The corner of his mouth twisted into a sad excuse for a smile, but more importantly, his eyes were fixed on Roberto. “That ain’t it either.”

“You sure? I thought my dalliance with Tom would fill you with enough furor to get off your butt—”

“Leeland’s gonna have his dads,” Sam said quietly, in the tired little voice he never used with anyone else. He couldn’t let himself be weak, ever – except when Roberto was there to take the weight for a little while.

Roberto blinked. “…Yes?” When Sam didn’t continue, Roberto laughed. “Meu Deus, you dumbass. Did you get jealous of your siblings for stealing your Ma? Did she run out of love after the first three? Did you?” He shook his head. “He’s your son. He’s my son. We’re not going on Mutant Maury. Warlock won’t care and Doug will get used to it and DJ won’t ever know anything different.”

“…I guess.”

“He guesses.” Roberto threw up his hands and stood, hauling Sam up after him. “Now, come back inside and help me break into the second vault. We haven’t even touched the bourbon yet, and if Wolverine is going to murder me, by God I’ll make it worth his while.”

They moved to the edge of the plane. In a practiced move, Roberto threw an arm around Sam’s shoulders while Sam grabbed his waist, and Sam gently blasted them back down to ground level. Roberto didn’t let go when the dirt was beneath his feet once more, and Sam’s hand lingered at the small of his back as they headed back towards the safehouse.

Dani and Amara met them halfway, Warlock dragging his feet behind them. 

“Grab your kit, we’re airborne in ten.” Dani threw a flask of whiskey at Roberto, knowing he’d try to take it all with him out of principle if they didn’t throw him a bone. “Magneto has the baby. He was right, they’re near Salem Center. Kitty’s working on exact coordinates, she and Shan will intercept us on the way.” 

The boys packed their things and raced back to where the others had gathered at the tree line. As they turned to head to the plane, Warlock froze. His crest prickled like the spines of a sea urchin, shifting and lowering as he turned to look back towards the safehouse. There were only five of them. They’d come with six. 

Roberto cupped his hands over his mouth. “Yana, move your ass!”

Someone emerged from the cabin, but it wasn’t Illyana. It was the Darkchilde. She stepped forward on cloven feet, her entire body banded in silver except for the flicker of tail behind her. Already her face was lost to them, sealed beneath a helmet with pits of smoldering ash for eyes, yet still her gaze never wandered from them. The soulsword gleamed in her hand, a sharpness that cut through the air with its presence.

Slapping a hand to her forehead, Dani groaned, “Not again…”

“Well thanks for moving Yana but it turns out you can go back inside, the rest of us will be leaving now—” Roberto grabbed as many of his teammates as he could, trying to herd them towards the plane and away from the week’s newest catastrophe. Never in their lives had the Darkchilde spelled anything other than trouble.

“Yes. You will.” 

The Blackbird roared to life, rumbling forward on a takeoff route. Sam blasted towards it in a panic. His fingers scrambled at the crack of the door, trying to wrest it open as the plane lifted into the air. The jets kicked in. Off into the distance it screamed as Sam went hurtling backwards. He managed to correct course just before impact and looped back around to land between the Darkchilde and the team. 

Wheezing, he tried the logic that had failed him all evening. “Illyana, we can’t afford distractions. I know you’re worried about Leeland, but this isn’t—”

She laughed, cold and bitter. “You think this about the child? Short-sighted fools. A soul gem has been taken. Not my own – they’ve taken Pixie. My future births itself in the present. We strike now, or all is lost.”

“Then we warn the X-Men—”

“Prepare yourselves.”

Roberto pushed past Sam, getting right up in the Darkchilde’s face. Well, horns. “Like hell we will. DJ’s waited long enough.”

She tilted her head a few degrees, no more. “Here, it will be one hour. There it will be weeks.” 

He growled, the dark shadows of Sunspot nipping at his fists. “Y’know, I’m getting pretty fucking tired of everyone telling me not to go save my baby.”

Dani coughed loudly, and everyone turned to look at her. Then, slowly, they all looked to Warlock. He stood there like a creature on the verge of extinction, long past his hopes for rescue – shame and judgment in the body of a failing palm tree, a symbol of everything they’d failed, they’d lost. 

Only the Darkchilde neglected to look, advancing on Dani instead. “In the timelines I left, this entire team is dead. Led to their slaughter. Stand with me and I will keep it from happening again.”

“Then tell us what’s really going on,” Amara answered firmly. She planted her hands on her hips. “We can’t be as blind as before.”

The Darkchilde sneered. “And they forget you are a politician’s daughter. We leave now.”

Her stepping discs cut through the air, swallowing up the New Mutants toe to head. Each one moved steadily upward with machine-like precision, or tried to. Once Warlock’s disc hit his knees, it flashed and whirled like a top kicked off its axis, spinning wildly out of synch. As the discs crashed and collided, they fritzed out entirely.

Warlock’s eyes flashed once in warning, and he didn’t say a word.

“You show your danger even now, Technarch. It is a lesson I know well. But they will need every ally to survive what comes. Didn’t you say you came back for family?”

The Darkchilde raised her sword to him, then turned it towards each of the New Mutants in turn, point even with their throats. In the end she leaned it against her shoulder, standing tall. Under the helmet, she may have even smiled. “Choose now. This family or the other.”

It took him only a moment to make his decision.

Warlock bowed his head, crest drooping to cover his face like the fronds of an ancient willow. He couldn’t look at them. His voice rasped as dried leaves in the wind.

“…Self is so very, very sorry.”

The stepping discs swallowed them up.

Warlock headed east.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A CLIFFHANGER......... There will be no more until late April at the earliest; tax season is kicking this accountant's ass. This is only half of what's written so far, I just have no dang time to edit.
> 
> (Further note that while Limbo escapades are plot-essential, they'll not be on screen.......reworking one entire Event was enough for me folks.)
> 
> Lyrics ala The Smiths, "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," because Jono's real bad at children's songs.


	10. Chapter 10

Jono limped back into the house to discover Magneto bent over a listless lump of a Leeland. The old man had tucked the red rabbit into the boy’s arms and kept trying to draw Leeland into a conversation, hands moving slowly but surely. Jono watched them blankly for a few minutes, wondering just how many of the X-Men had learned to sign for this single toddler. Few had ever tried to reach Penance with even a quarter of that effort.

At a loss, he drifted into the kitchen and headed for the kettle. The cupboards revealed only a small tin of teabags; selection enough for a mug of builder’s tea, at least.

“Your leg is bleeding.”

Jono glanced over and finally noticed the woman lingering in the doorway, a wet washcloth held in her outstretched hand. He took it with a nod. “Cheers.”

As he sat down to finally take stock of the damage from his fall, the woman stepped over to mind the kettle. He watched her carefully as soon as she turned her back. She looked more tired than stern, her hair long since turned to ashen grey, but she carried herself like an old-fashioned governess, unbent under the weight of considerable duties yet harried by a lack of resources. In a house like this, he couldn’t imagine why. 

Her eyes were sharp when she turned back with his mug of tea in hand, as though she warred at herself: one half trained to look and evaluate, the other too polite to stare at a guest. After setting down his drink, she hesitated, then went back to fetch milk and sugar as well. Good lady.

Jono took a long drink. It scalded on the way down, warming him in a way his old furnace never did, and the corners of his eyes crinkled as he watched her through the steam. “Haven’t the foggiest fuck who you are.”

“The pleasure’s mutual.”

She didn’t say another word. After a few minutes, she picked up the bloodied washcloth and disappeared upstairs, returning shortly with a proper first aid kit and a roll of gauze. 

He’d nicked a shallow, bloody gash in his shin, but it was the strain on his old poorly-healed fractures that had done the real damage. Normally Jono would’ve let it go—a distant normal, before there was a 2-year-old he had to model proper self-care for. Plus a lady sitting by his elbow who’d probably judge him for bleeding on the tile. So he hiked up his trouser leg and wrapped himself up.

The woman was still there when he was done, and only then did Jono notice the faint freckles on her nose and cheeks. He felt like a fucking idiot. In his defense, only a rotting sasquatch at the side of the highway would have a family resemblance to Cy after his trek.

“You’re Leeland’s nan, yeah?”

“…It’s the first time I’ve been called that, but yes.”

“You didn’t know.”

She shook her head, looking out the kitchen window. It didn’t feel like she was avoiding his gaze; she was waiting on someone. “No. Not until Michael showed up four days ago.”

Jono raised his eyebrows. “Michael?”

“Magneto.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He hates it when I call him Michael. I can’t stop.” 

By the time Jono stopped choking on his tea, the woman had replaced her veneer of respectable calm. She sighed. “You must think me…uncaring, or worse, that I’m hiding in here instead of meeting my grandson. I made Michael teach me how to sign hello. It’s a start. But…Leeland is a teleporter and a toddler and has been through months of chaos. I’m a stranger to him.”

“You’re…scared?”

“No. I’m rational. If forcing my way into his life on a pretense of bloodline could hurt him, then it isn’t worth the risk. I’ve waited eight years. I can wait another week or two until he’s regained his bearings.” This time, the kind smile she gave him was fake, tinged with an undercurrent of self-loathing he was all too familiar with. “Another cup?”

Jono yanked his trouser leg back down over his bandages and tossed the first aid kit onto the table. “Got any apples?”

It took him a while to convince her that Leeland really would gobble down the entire bushel she’d picked up at the farmers market. Knife in hand, Jono carved the first apple into eight small bunnies in three minutes flat. The second time around he went slower and made sure she understood how to form the cuts. They’d prepped a plate of over fifty apple bunnies by the time the first one had started to brown at the edges, and that was the cue to feed the boy.

Leeland still hadn’t moved from his sad spot on the floor, but he scrambled to his feet with a shout when he spotted Jono bringing in a platter of his favorite snack. Just as soon as his mood snapped to joyous, however, it zinged back the other way around. He burst into sobs so fierce they shook his tiny body, and when Magneto reached out for him, the boy screamed and pushed him away.

Shoving the apple platter into Magneto’s nearby hands, Jono scooped up the toddler and carried him over to the couch. Leeland continued to struggle all the while, only devolving into quieter sniffles when Jono clutched his face between two blue hands and gave him a big kiss to the forehead. 

_Little Bee okay? Do you have booboo?_

Tears welled up again in the boy’s eyes, only cured with another kiss to his brow. If his forehead had special significance, Jono sure as hell didn’t know, but he’d seen Cy do it all the time.

Finally Leeland lifted his hands, looking away from Jono as he answered. _Little Bee bad._ He covered his face and tried to hide.

Although Jono couldn’t remember the word for perfect, he did remember _I love you._ He signed it to Leeland until his scared look turned to one of confusion.

_Blue Bee mad! Blue left!_

He shook his head, he’d never leave that kid after all that had happened. But Leeland was persistent.

_Little Bee **broke music.**_

He pointed at the guitar case, still lying in a heap where it had fallen and newly unzipped by worried hands. Sure enough, the neck had snapped halfway down, fractured in the fall and finished off by the tension in the strings. On a normal day, Jono’d be cursing the whole motherfucking world at losing that guitar after everything. Right now he didn’t give a damn.

_I --- music. Not you._ Lacking the word for fall, Jono mimed a plummeting hand that cracked against his knee in a smack that had the other adults startling. He gave them a sheepish wave before looking back to Leeland. _Not mad. Love you. Eat._

With his broken heart healed, Leeland gobbled down the apple bunnies lickety-split. He even carried one over, snug in his cupped palms, to show Magneto how cute it was before he viciously bit off its head. When his supply ran low, his nan carefully passed him the second platter, and he scarcely seemed to note her presence before crunching down on the next round of buns.

Magneto cleared his throat. “Sheila, may I introduce Jonothon Starsmore. Jonothon, this is Douglas’s mother, Sheila Ramsey.”

“We had tea,” she answered carefully. Perhaps she was hesitant to get too far into the good graces of a notorious terrorist, however amiable she appeared to his presence and cause. Looking Jono’s way, she gave him a nod. “A pleasure.”

“Just Jono, thanks.” He ruffled a hand through Leeland’s hair protectively, keeping the boy close to him. “There a reason _you’re_ here playing house, _Michael?”_

Magneto blinked once, processing, and then straightened to his full height. “The New Mutants were, and will always be, my students. Leeland’s wellbeing is of utmost importance to me.”

Jono looked him over, seeing if he could make the old man sweat – he couldn’t, but it was worth a shot. After letting an evaluative silence hang for a little while longer, he nudged Leeland. _Who is this?_

_Grampa!_

“…Alright, Gramps, your story checks out.” A zombie and an alien for parents, and a mass murderer for a grandfather. Fucking perfect. “Now sod off and let me talk to the gremlin.”

Jono turned back to Leeland before Magneto managed to wipe the flare of incredulous anger from his face. Score one for Starsmore. If there was one thing he was good at, it was keeping his mind off a stressful clusterfuck by inciting a completely new clusterfuck. Kept him on his toes.

Leeland’s eyes flicked between Jono and Magneto in wary confusion. He didn’t move, though. He’d probably gotten used to the adults around him having conversations he wasn’t invited to. Cy had tried to keep those to a minimum.

Jono crouched down so he was as close to eye level with Leeland as he could get. He counted their little family and pointed around the room as he did. _Little Bee, rabbit friend, Blue Bee. Where Big Bee?_

Eyes wide, Leeland tried to mimic Jono’s pose and crouched down himself. He nearly took a tumble backwards, Sheila instinctively darting forward to steady him and stopping herself at the last moment. Catching himself, the boy sagged back against the foot of the sofa instead. He gestured Jono over like he had a secret to tell, and Jono dutifully followed after him.

_Big Bee here._

He gestured to his heart with one little, stubby finger.

Jono’s stomach flopped; a foreign, borderline grotesque sensation for a man who’d gone so long with nothing moving around in there at all. You didn’t fucking say that to a child, not unless you were five minutes away from dying of cancer. 

Leeland’s eyes twinkled with golden fairy dust as they watched each other, and Jono thought suddenly of that last moment before Cy passed his child over. There was gold then, too. Gold like the light the faerie child had used to repower his father months earlier. Cy had given it all back.

He hadn’t left Leeland alone. Cy had entrusted the boy to people who’d care for him – a repentant mother, a man with enough blood on his hands to defend any child, and the sad sack of shit who couldn’t find the heart to give up on them – and then he’d gone off to die, taking all the danger with him.

_What did Big Bee say?_ Jono didn’t trust his command of their language, not with such urgency thrumming in his veins. He pressed images towards Leeland’s mind as best he could: Cy in the woods, Cy building songs in the motel room, Cy fixedly cutting the crust off of PB &J sandwiches. _Where is he?_

Hesitating, Leeland finally swam one sad, wavering hand out to poke at Jono’s chest. Then he ran away, like he’d broken a promise and had to go hide before they dragged him to timeout.

“What is—” Magneto signed bee, as if it didn’t involve a tiny finger-kiss to his own cheek. 

“Bee. His hivemind. Cy is Big Bee, Lee is Little Bee.” He didn’t mention his own hivename. 

“Fascinating. His hivemind has been functional since before birth, but only transmode carriers can truly communicate that way. It’s always been unidirectional even with those he has been formatted to accept.”

Jono stared at him. Sheila’s eyes had glazed over. You didn’t need a user’s manual for a baby, alien or not. Infant formatting sounded like code for a cult’s preschool. 

“He shows me all kinds of shit, won’t shut up.” He shrugged, then raked a hand through his hair. “He doesn’t know where his dad went, but if we don’t find Cy soon there won’t be anything left to find.”

It took Jono a moment to realize what he’d said. He glanced at Sheila. “…Sorry.”

Magneto stepped closer, radiating an oppressive urgency – or maybe his magnetism always felt like a suburban mom pumping herself up for a fight in the predawn hours of Black Friday. “Leeland told you something.”

“This?” Jono swam his hand. “Cy was teaching him about salmon last night.

Magneto gave him an odd look. It was the first time they nearly sympathized.

“He said they always swim back to where they came from. And now we’re at the place he grew up. But he’s not here, so that doesn’t give us a bloody clue.”

“What did he say exactly?” Magneto asked.

“I just told you.”

“Jonothon, this is very important. Douglas’s powers mean he is extremely exact in his diction. How did he phrase it exactly? Can you sign it?”

Jono scowled at the name and the lecture alike. “He just said they go back where they came from. That sense exactly.”

Magneto thought it over, nodded, and said, “He didn’t mean here. We have to go.” He looked to the stairs expectantly.

A half minute later, Leeland appeared from upstairs, peeking around the corner as if he didn’t quite believe he wasn’t in trouble after everything. Magneto walked over, signed something like _Goodbye, I will come back,_ and ruffled his hair. 

Leeland stared past him to Jono.

The boy didn’t seem concerned about Magneto leaving at all, but he’d panicked when Jono took off. It must be a goodbye ritual they had – any kid raised by the X-Men would have to get used to guardians disappearing on them on a daily basis. No matter how many people you surrounded them with, that was lonely as hell.

Jono swept Leeland up into his arms, hugging him tight. Then he glanced over at the woman who’d been watching intently the entire time yet never offered a word. He didn’t have much experience with mothers who weren’t shit, and the way Sheila seemed to tiptoe around the current disaster made him think she didn’t know a damn thing about mutants, not really. But Cy—Doug—had brought his child to her for safety and solace. For love. He had to trust that for now.

“He teleports,” he grumbled. For all he’d complained about the kid never giving him a moment’s peace, now he couldn’t manage to pry himself away.

“I know.” Sheila didn’t look panicked at the prospect. She looked frozen, trapped in the in-between until they brought her either a son or an ending. 

“You have to watch him when he signs. Even if you don’t understand. It’s important he knows he’s heard.”

For the first time in days, Sheila bit back a smile. “He’s my grandson. I can handle it.”

“Right.” 

Jono still hesitated, giving Leeland one last squeeze before passing him into Sheila’s arms. When he turned, he found Magneto buttoned into an old-fashioned brown overcoat that made him look like a 1920s reporter. Car keys dangled in his hand. 

Truth be told, he’d thought Magneto had magnetized his way there, floating ominously through the air like in all the footage. 

The beige Cadillac parked outside tooted mournfully when he raised the key, and all the man’s remaining aura of danger evaporated. There was a child’s car seat in the back. Magneto buckled his seatbelt and put his hands on the wheel at ten and two. He obeyed traffic signals and never ran a yellow, always slowing to an easy stop. Bloody fucking ridiculous.

Jono gazed aimlessly out the window, wondering how everything seemed vaguely familiar. They’d passed through so many small towns that they’d almost all started to look alike, but there was no mistaking New York for California. A street sign about a memorial highway finally tipped him off.

“This is close to the Xavier school, innit?” 

“Yes. But that isn’t where he’s gone.” Magneto’s hands clenched on the wheel, once, and then eased back into a firm, attentive grip. “There wasn’t a graveyard off the school in those days. Charles was so…optimistic. They buried Douglas in a civilian cemetery.”

“…He’s gone to his grave.” Jono’s forehead clunked against the window.

“It’s where he came from,” Magneto agreed coldly. All the warmth he’d struggled to profess around Leeland had slipped away as they drove. Now there were simply two burnt out men on their way to a makeshift funeral.

They’d pulled onto the winding road that led down into the valley of the graveyard when Magneto swore and pulled the car to a screeching halt. The moment he was out of the car, he finally did his magical floating routine to peer at something up ahead. 

Ready for a fight, Jono reached up to activate his hard light tech. Nothing happened. It didn’t even spark, only sat as a useless weight on his neck. He was on his own. Whatever, it always turned out that way. He got out of the car and peered into the valley. American graveyards were eerie places, mowed lawns and neat corners and anonymous blocks of polished stone. Hardly a tree in sight except for the hills, and the sky spread wide above. Not crammed together generation on top of generation for thousands of years – no pretending, back home. 

He could hear Magneto muttering under his breath ahead and above.

“How the tables have turned… This time I was the optimist.”

The sun peeked through the cloud cover and a thin trail of light shimmered through the valley like silver polish in a meandering stream. Everywhere it touched, the earth had turned a sickly grey, and even the trees had bent their boughs away in desperation to flee. Jono followed the road down to where the trail started, breaking in through a fence from the south. Where once was grass, everything had been turned to soot and ash. 

He followed the drag marks farther into the cemetery, stark wounds carved into the earth as easily as steps through fallen snow. It didn’t cut clear across the plots, instead following their grid like a map of landmines, forbidden to tread upon. Polite, even now.

Cemeteries were always quiet – fewer trees meant fewer birds. But not this quiet. Not a silence so suffocating he felt Cy before he even saw him. 

Something up ahead, a psychiatrist’s inkblot test in living shape, lumbering over an overturned plot. 

The earth sank under Jono’s feet, sucked so dry of any life or moisture that it curled into a whiff of ash. 

“Cy?”

The creature turned – the bones, the face, those were Cy’s. But where once was gold, only the seething void remained. Silver flickered through its cheeks, whirlpools in dark hollowed eyes, and it stilled long enough for a handful of dirt to drop from the elongated tendrils of its hands. 

Jono knew exactly what he was looking at, the end stage of the nightmare goo’s quest to hold his friend together. The skin had gone, the flesh. All that remained was bone and iron will, and like living tar it fused him back together in unearthly shapes. The fingers hung low like they could not remember where they were meant to end, the ribs doubled back in on themselves to forge sharp weapons. Jono himself had made every joke, back in the day, about being a bag of bones held together with mummy wrappings – it had never been this. 

He was digging up his own grave. Jono held up his hands to prove himself nonthreatening and inched forward, trying to judge if Cy recognized him, if he would attack. The closer he got, the more the smell hit him – iron and old books, not quite rot yet overpowering all the same. 

Cy didn’t move. 

“Nice headstone,” Jono offered weakly. He peered around the back and found Cy’s sneakers, removed and placed out of harm’s way. He tried to swallow the lump in his throat, casually slinging his hands into his jacket instead. “Who’d you bury?”

Silver light dripped from the hollows of its cheeks. It wanted to rest. Jono had never developed a shred of empathic ability – unless you counted his uncanny ability to project self-loathing – but felt Cy’s exhaustion in his very bones. Maybe it was a remnant of Leeland’s hivemind, trying to bridge the gap. Maybe it was because Jono knew that feeling better than anyone. He reached out to touch Cy’s shoulder.

And Cy began to scream.

“Get back, Jonothon.” He could hear Magneto yelling over the shattered squeal of pain, a record player eviscerating a devil’s tune. “Do not allow it to touch you!”

All the loose, drifting pieces of living cord and wire had snapped in tight to Cy’s body, wrapping him up in a misshapen cocoon of agony. He thought, unwillingly, of Angelo, tangled up in himself and trying to explain it wasn’t funny, it was _part_ of him, and as Jono turned he saw Magneto clench his fist tighter, the screams cracking through the air.

In four months, Cy had never made a sound. 

Magneto was used to people obeying. When Jono scampered back to his side, he loosened his grip on the techno-organic monster a single inch and turned to explain the situation. He didn’t expect Jono to crack the heel of a sneaker into his jaw.

It wasn’t a blow that could stagger a mass murderer. It did stop the screaming. For a precious moment, Magneto turned his attention onto Jono instead, hauling him into the air by the metal zipper on his coat. Not a firm hold, but it didn’t need to be – they both knew Jono was powerless.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Magneto hissed, eyes dark with a storm of grief.

If he wanted to be quiet and pretend this was rational, this was the plan, then he could do it on his own. Jono would scream as long as it took to make Cy never sound like that again. “You don’t bloody well know either!”

“This isn’t a _mutation._ This is an alien virus that will kill you at a touch.” Like a child with a dolly, he twisted Jono in the air until he could see the trail of destruction that led them here. Alien. The smell, the earth, something too foreign to exist comfortably in this world. “All it does is consume. He’s a rabid dog, Jonothon. He deteriorated too fast.”

Below them, Cy curled his soot-stained roots into the earth and pulled.

“We have to contain it and bring it in safely. If I remove the contagion—”

Jono shook his head, straining his neck to do it with gravity against him. “It’s the only thing keeping him together. It’s—it’s part of him. Like Leeland.” He looked Magneto in the eye and didn’t falter. “Are you going to rip your grandson’s alien bits out through his skin, too?”

Magneto dropped him.

“You’ve been in contact with it,” he concluded quietly, looking like he’d just been tasked with handing Jono a death sentence. 

He thought of how Paige and the others talked about the Phalanx, their fear of infection so strong that Paige always tore off her skin even in the telling of it. He thought of Leeland, devouring pizza after pizza as though his stomach were feeding a platoon of thirty marines. He thought of Cy, writing steadily and pressing the marker firm against the paper when Jono asked if the nightmare goo would hurt him – _**No.**_

Jono sneered and raised a thumb to his face, cutting it through the air in the shape of the line curling up from his lips. “Been in contact with far worse.”

He turned back to the grave and its digger. As he came up from behind, he reached out a hand to Cy’s back. It burned at the touch, the same way touching something too cold confused your senses. It also stuck to him. It barely recognized which bones were its master’s.

The coffin lay bare, now. The earth had all fallen away. 

“This isn’t where you come from, sunshine. You’re not an after-image.” Jono couldn’t remember the last time his own voice had sounded that soft. Leeland didn’t need soft words.

If Cy was listening, he couldn’t tell. The man’s head hung towards the coffin. It had rested there for so long.

Jono dropped his hand, stepped around him, and wedged himself in between Cy and the coffin. If he inched back even a bit, he’d tumble down into it. He set his shoulders and dared Cy to make him move. 

“Listen to me. You’re you. I don’t care if you’re Cy or Doug or whatever you want to call yourself. I don’t care if you’re human.” He jabbed a finger at Cy’s chest and let the tar lap weakly around the indent he’d made. “There’s somebody in there and they need help. Let me help.”

“The grave is empty, Douglas.” Magneto had come around to the other side of the grave, positioning himself behind the headstone so Cy could see him. “You crawled out of it, I know. We paid to have it made nice again, but there isn’t anything inside. There never should have been. This isn’t where you belong.”

It was a miracle to have Magneto back him up, let alone follow his lead. It wasn’t enough. Cy didn’t move.

Silver where once was gold. Thick as tar. Sluggish. 

Jono stepped forward and reached out to Cy’s head, fingers skirting bone as the ink ebbed back from his touch. If it had only ever been control that kept it from hurting Jono, then that was all but gone now. He cupped Cy’s head, touch soft at the same spot as the wound he’d once cleaned up. Cy had given his son to Jono for a reason. 

“You carried Leeland halfway across the world. Let me carry you the rest of the way.”

Cy swayed into him, then away.

Jono didn’t dare to breathe. Didn’t need the luxury.

A hand came up to push at Jono’s chest, palm flat over the markings his family had left him. Red, like staring at the sun from behind your eyelids.

Everything tilted.

Tipsy, his mother turning to smack her face against the wall, blue shadows bleeding from the corners of Cy’s eyes, a puff of smoke curling around lips he’d lost and found and lost again. His blood, dancing through a hospital’s tubes, a transfusion of snowglobe glitter, bubbling under skin softer than he’d ever known. The ring around an eclipse, blue as the sea, the deep dark sprawl of it under his window as he flew across the Atlantic how many times now, penning songs he’d never sing, humming words that only hands could express, folded tiredly under his own, folding in like paper airplanes in schoolroom boredom, with everything so distant, everything yet to—

They fell backwards into the open earth.

Magneto cushioned the blow, lowering Jono down by his zipper and belt once more. Cy had collapsed into Jono’s chest, held together by frail sheets of night sky, and he shivered even as Jono wrapped his leather jacket around him. The pitch-bog of his body had melted back beneath the surface as though he’d been flesh and bone the entire time, and when Jono pulled back an eyelid just to see if he’d been imagining things, there was a bloodshot blue eye there like always. 

He smoothed back the greasy mess of Cy’s hair, let his own head thud back against the wood of the coffin underneath him, and stared up at the sky.


	11. Chapter 11

Kitty wheeled the Blackbird into a perfect parallel park between the New Mutants’ jet and the trees they’d parked obnoxiously close to. She turned off the ignition, tossed Xi’an the keys, and leaned back in the pilot’s seat with her arms folded behind the helmet of her phase suit. 

“Yes, yes, who was I to question your piloting ability,” Xi’an said dryly, unbuckling her seatbelt. “The very nerve of it.”

Kitty threw up her hands as her suit beeped an even, **“I know. Right.”** They’d finally gotten the speech functionality going, but it left a lot of emotion to be desired – if she could just get Warlock alone for ten minutes, they’d be able to work it out no problem. 

Tabby, the third member of their impromptu field team, pressed her face against the window as she scanned the field. “So uh, about how we called them like, eighteen times and no one answered, because the Bird’s here but the radar says no people are in the safe house—”

“Suit up,” Xi’an sighed. Nothing had gone their way since Leeland popped off the radar four months earlier, why they expected anything different now was a mystery. 

The three of them had set out from Utopia as soon as they’d received word from Magneto. Even though Kitty’s suit was still in its testing stage, there was no chance of her staying behind, and Tabby had taken every excuse to come with. Xi’an certainly didn’t mind the company. It would’ve been a long and lonely flight without them, and she was especially glad to have them now. 

The last they’d heard from the New Mutants, they were en route to New York, but their plane had never left the safe house. Kitty’s initial scan couldn’t find any damage to their Blackbird and it started up as easily as ever. The safe house didn’t show any signs of a struggle, though it was clear everyone had left in a hurry. Food and drink lay littered around the kitchen. The beds in the bunker downstairs were still free of sheets and pillows, so they’d never stayed the night. They’d just up and vanished.

Tabby whipped herself up a whisky lemonade from a fancy open bottle at the bar and sat down to wait. After ringing Sam and Dani yet again, Xi’an gave up and accepted a glass herself. Kitty wandered the halls, determined to find the hidden weaponry room that Wolverine had certainly stashed somewhere. While she couldn’t do much in a phase suit, she could still grip a sword, thank you very much.

When she finally returned from her wanderings, a wrapped up pile of weaponry stacked in her arms, Kitty kicked a low table over in front of a chair to serve as her footrest and settled down. **“SO,”** she beeped loudly. Volume was her only way to be dramatic. **“When do we give up and go grab the baby ourselves?”**

“Not without the team.”

“To be fair,” Tabby began with a wave of her glass, “That means leaving Magneto with the baby.”

Xi’an rolled her eyes. “He’ll survive.”

“Which one?”

“They’ll just have carrot sticks and Magneto will vent his sins as always.”

“Soooo like, at what age do we shut that down? Because that’s a lot of weight for a baby and all. Like. _A lot._ Have you seen what Cable did to Hope?”

“I’m not the Magneto Whisperer, Tabs.”

Tabby held up her hands and turned back to her lemonade. The whiskey hadn’t been worth it.

**“Where is Magneto waiting for the pickup?”** Kitty had forgotten to turn down the volume, still booming.

“Somewhere residential with room for the Blackbirds.” Xi’an pulled up the address on her phone and read it aloud. 

Kitty froze. 

Even for Magneto, it was unconscionable. They had an agreement, they _all_ had an agreement – the moment Magneto had looked the Ramseys in the face and said _hunting accident,_ everything was settled. They buried their words with Doug, their secrets and his secrets and all their shame. Kitty had written to Mrs. Ramsey for months afterward, trying to twist the same condolences into new shape, trying to give her anything without revealing who Doug had really been. Now Mrs. Ramsey would know her a liar, but far worse, they’d given Doug’s secrets away without his permission yet again. And if Mrs. Ramsey knew about Doug, then she’d have to know about—

Outside, a heavy thud shook the earth, followed by the muffled sounds of complaining. 

They raced outside just in time to see the remnants of stepping discs evaporate into thin air. Three, four, five of them – Xi’an let out a breath, her full team accounted for – then six, ten? They weren’t alone. Warlock emerged in fits and starts, his disc sputtering unearthly steam as he dragged a struggling mass of transmode cocoons behind him, each large enough to fit a grown man. He clung close to Illyana, curled protectively over her like a bodyguard turned umbrella, as though the tracks on her wrung out face were from rain alone. When she stepped forward, Warlock wrapped round her arm to support her steps, though they were solid enough not to need the help.

For a long moment, all anyone did was breathe. Some of them not even that.

“What is on your _face?”_ Tabby hissed at the scraggly mess of hair on Roberto’s chin, then pointed at Sam’s stubble with an even more horrified gasp.

Xi’an rushed to Dani’s side at once – the woman’s arm was clearly wrenched out of its shoulder socket, if not broken entirely. Amara stood similarly ragged, silent and singed and staring straight at Warlock.

Still nobody spoke. They all watched Warlock, waiting.

Finally, Warlock tied off the cocoons into a block and left them wriggling futilely on the ground. He stepped away from Illyana, looked at the team—

And took Sam’s fist straight to the face.

It struck against solid brick, knuckles cracking loud. Sam bit back the pain, snarling. He’d known it would happen, hadn’t even given Warlock the forewarning to shift into something softer, a pillow for a punch. Wasn’t about that. He clenched his fingers, feeling the joints scream, and grabbed part of Warlock’s crest with his unhurt hand.

Tabby screamed at him, trying to throw herself between them even as Roberto moved to hold her back. Xi’an turned around, mouth open to call them both down, but Dani squeezed her shoulder. 

“Warlock,” Dani said, and it hurt even Xi’an’s ears to hear it like that. She’d said it like she would _Empath,_ like a two-faced snake in their midst, and Xi’an couldn’t imagine a reason why. Her eyes whipped to Warlock, to the friend she’d talked back from despair all too many times these past few months, but any hurt had been wiped from his face. 

It was Illyana who stepped into the stalemate, curling her fingers around Sam’s forearm. “Limbo cannot abide by Technarchs. This is known. I needed him in my back pocket, and tricking you was the only way to preserve the ruse.”

“We were _bait,”_ Sam spat. He didn’t look at Illyana – they expected it from her. He only looked at Warlock. “She promised you your kid, and you left us for dead.”

“Just tell us what you did, buddy.” Roberto was still holding onto Tabby, though he seemed to be protecting himself as much as her. This wasn’t a fight he wanted. The quickest way to defuse it was to get everything aired out.

But Warlock said nothing.

“I ported him to Limbo shortly after your arrival.” There wasn’t an inch of remorse in Illyana’s stiff spine. “He stole the Blackbird. He returned it. He lied to you on my order. For six weeks, he followed the army and provided espionage on the enemy. He infiltrated and corrupted the systems. He ensured you were not in the danger I knew was waiting.” She gestured to the wriggling cocoons with their distant screams. 

“Last time you were dead. Last time all those soldiers were dead. Last time Hell came to this world in so many names you would weep in the telling. He did only what you do now – weighed strategies and took the lowest cost.” 

“Then he can fucking speak for himself.” Sam wrenched her hand off of his, letting go of Warlock’s crest at the same time. Something slippery as despair slithered into his voice. “Tell me she tricked you, ‘Lock. Tell me you didn’t know what they’d do to us.”

“You’re alive, Sam. Everyone’s alive. Pixie is alive. We have our souls back. What more do you want?” Illyana snapped, patience and diplomacy finally fracturing. 

Kitty took a step towards her, only one, but Illyana’s gaze never twitched her way. She hadn’t looked at Kitty even once, not in relief, not in curiosity at her new suit, not even for support. She didn’t wear her armor, but Warlock loomed like a second skin, so maybe she didn’t need anything else. If she’d really weaponized Warlock, then—

The alien’s eyes shuttered for a second, fluttering softly before their light and intensity returned to the argument. Kitty’s heart twisted in her chest. She knew that expression anywhere, the split second Warlock took to adjust the weight on his heart, the same way humans took a deep breath to refocus themselves in a situation they hated. She _knew_ Warlock, always had in every face he’d ever worn, and she knew Illyana even better. 

_What more do you want?_ For the first time, Illyana felt _safe._ That’s what this was. Whatever had happened, that’s what they’d won – and her own team was telling her it wasn’t enough. That’s why Warlock swayed into her, when Illyana’s pride would never let her sag back and accept his support. That’s why Illyana wouldn’t look at her, couldn’t risk seeing Kitty make the same evaluation, that after everything her soul wasn’t worth even a few weeks of hell. 

Sam turned to shout at Illyana once more, and Warlock flicked out a finger and brushed Sam’s cheek away from her, repositioning his face as if he were no more than an ill-behaved show dog in the ring. 

“Self made Self’s choices. There is no other blame.”

Sam touched his cheek in disbelief. Warlock had manhandled them all since the beginning, misinterpreting personal space and politeness and decency, but he’d never twisted them into new shape the way he did to himself. He’d never treated them like lesser life-forms, distant and annoyed. 

He jabbed a finger in Warlock’s face in turn. “We have bigger concerns, but this ain’t over. And when it is, we’re going to have a long, hard talk about your place on this team.”

“Affirmative.”

Sam stormed off toward the Blackbirds, muttering darkly about preparing the hold for human storage. With a mood-breaking whistle, a shocked Roberto hurried off after him.

Xi’an leaned down so Dani and Amara could quietly fill her in. Tabby stood there stock still, looking from the boys’ retreating figures to Warlock and back again. With everyone distracted, Kitty took another small step towards Illyana, but the woman turned and leaned back into the hollows of Warlock’s wary form.

“This was my battle,” Illyana hissed to him in Russian. She did not look into his eyes, knowing he could see her with every molecule. “My victory. You should not pay the price.”

He hummed softly all around her, fond and dreadfully tired. “Selfriendillyana, we are no longer children. Everything has a price.”

“Your allegiance was to their safety.”

A gentle tendril curled down to kiss at her forehead. “So selfriend says.” 

“Warlock…”

He peered around her and pushed gently at her shoulders, beaming. “Now selfriend must go. Importantbeing awaits.” 

Illyana still didn’t turn, knowing she’d find Kitty inching towards them, trying to look casual inside that monstrous new suit. They’d both waited a long, long time for this particular hug; nothing felt like coming home quite like the weight of Kitty’s arms around her. But there would be no understanding, no forgiveness, no sweet wisp of flowey scent in her hair, no warm neck to press her tired eyes against. 

This was the worst, in every timeline. The moment Kitty’s shimmering ghost reached her, teammates and allies dead all around, Illyana’s soul still lost and the Old Gods ravaging the land. No sweet words, then. Only the bitter irony that for all Illyana could destroy, she couldn’t touch the one person that mattered. And Kitty’s eyes, brimming with something she hadn’t had the soul to feel.

No one was dead, now. No new timeline to escape to for another try. 

Kitty tried to tell her something, soft and warbling with emotion as her gloved hand pushed against Illyana’s, but the suit couldn’t translate it. It beeped and buzzed in fractured confusion and brought silent laughter to Kitty’s lips. It was all Illyana could do to pull her close, holding on with such force that she wasn’t sure which would break first, the spacesuit or her own bones. 

Over Kitty’s shoulder, she watched Warlock turn back to the prisoners – the Limbo babies that had slipped through the cracks, raised into monsters and contained by Warlock for transport to yet another prison. Whether it was a kindness, only time would tell. But Warlock hadn’t done it for the babies. He hadn’t done it for the New Mutants. He hadn’t even done it for his sons – she’d never had to invoke Douglock’s presence in Limbo, never had to threaten either of his boys. He simply stepped in line behind her. His allegiance was to _her._

Illyana didn’t feel any different with her soul whole and healing within her. She thought she would. But maybe if Warlock, odd duck that he was, still saw something worthwhile in her, then Kitty would too. There wasn’t time for sweet words. The work wasn’t done. But for one stolen moment in her hour of victory, she tucked her face against Kitty’s neck and tried to let the world fade.

“Are those people in there?” Tabby had come up behind Warlock, struggling to parse the situation before her. 

Warlock sighed, hanging his head. “Go inside safebuilding, selfriend.”

“If someone’s got to take them back to Utopia, they’ll send me. I need to know.”

Warlock checked on the cocoons without a word to her. Tabby had held those babies all those years ago, and for all he could barely process his own heartbreak about it, he couldn’t inflict it on someone else.

“They’ll need someone to report on the situation.” Amara joined them, visibly exhausted but still sharp-eyed. “I’ll go. Illyana will accompany me. No more problems, no more distractions.”

Tabby bit her lip. They both knew that whoever went back to Utopia would be missing out on the reunion with Leeland. She’d never really been accepted as part of their little family, never been officially written into the hivemind or housed with their unit. She didn’t even know Doug. “You—”

“No more problems,” Amara repeated sweetly, daring Tabby to say another word. If she had to be part of yet another emotional family reunion today, she was going to puke. “No more distractions.”

  


* * *

  


Magneto wouldn’t get within three feet of Cy, but he did point Jono towards a battered suitcase of clothes in the trunk. It actually turned out to be easier to handle an unconscious Cy than a distracted one, and after months of practice shoving wiggling, defiant limbs into diapers and jackets, putting Cy into a shirt and trousers was a cinch. He leaned into Jono like a sunflower towards the sun, yet showed no signs of waking. Jono left him wrapped in his leather jacket in the back seat as Magneto drove them back to Sheila’s.

By the time they pulled up the long driveway into her estate, its population had grown fivefold. A Blackbird sat in one of the untended fields, hidden by the surrounding hills even as it towered over the house. Jono spotted a handful of New Mutants milling about the field. No Sheila.

His heart lurched at the thought of Leeland teleporting away with her – or worse, without her – but no one seemed to be particularly panicked. If anything, they looked anxious, wary of confronting a woman just to demand back the grandson she’d never known. As they should, he figured.

Magneto beelined straight to Sam and Dani, leaving Jono without a word of instruction. They’d already decided Sheila couldn’t be allowed to see Cy in the state he was in, so he’d probably gone off to get that settled. Time for talk, not action. X-Men, blah blah.

In the back seat, Cy stirred and pressed his face further into the jacket blanket, trying to burrow his way through the sleeve. Jono reached over to tug it off his face, then pressed the back of his hand to Cy’s forehead instead. The man was burning up. Withdrawal from Leeland’s energy source, maybe. The newcomers needed an update on Cy’s status, so Jono locked up the car and followed the driveway off towards the crowd.

Just then, something stood up in the field to his right, a nightmare straight out of a bad drug trip. Jono felt the same lurch of horror as he used to get looking in the mirror, the same powerlessness. It swung a gangly head his way, its crown planted with broad palm leaves that sharpened to knives and antennae, a fractious satellite. Its body seemed to grow from the head, a Rorschach humanoid, ink spilled on paper and folded for perfect symmetry, the joints a trick of origami, not of bone. The neck was too long, half giraffe and half Hollywood animatronics with no space for a sly operator inside. The wind picked up the smell, iron and—not old books, no, it hadn’t been that but dust instead, dust cultured inside of stars and space and carried in the cracks of the creature staring at him now with mournful golden eyes.

Its face moved, a semblance of crinkled eyes and soft smile, ruined by the effortless ripples of its features. It didn’t have skin, no muscle and bone to shape the face, no robotic facsimile of the inner workings; it thought and it _became,_ as simple as the shapes Jono screamed into the air. It had been years and dozens of mutants since the idea of a _shifter_ filled him with such primal revulsion, not since he was a small child fed on neighborhood folklore, black dogs roaming in the dark. 

It opened its mouth and all Jono saw was a farce, a pretty lie, a saving of face – wrappings to mimic a jaw, to hide what people would never accept. Its brow creased, crown sinking as though in deference. It felt his repulsion. It felt everything, fed on everything, devouring knowledge of every detail to respin it in new form. Before his very eyes, it hollowed itself into a mimicry of humanoid form, a plea for acceptance. If it spoke, it would be someone else’s voice, someone else’s words. 

It turned away from him a split second before a child’s sharp screams filled the air.

Kitty Pryde, wearing a suit halfway between a beekeeper and an astronaut, emerged from the farmhouse with Sheila and Leeland in tow. The boy thrashed about in his grandmother’s arms, snot and tears running all over his ruddy face, and pushed his lungs to their absolute limit. 

They weren’t walking towards the New Mutants. They were walking towards the creature. 

When they’d said alien, he’d thought of Doctor Who and Star Trek: face paint and a bit of prosthetic. Not a piece torn from the fabric of the universe and plopped down in their midst like it belonged there, like it wouldn’t rot their world from the inside out. Magneto said it carried a virus that killed you at a touch, and for the first time Jono understood why scientists kept trying their luck. It _was_ a weapon of mass destruction—took one to know one—but in that moment it only looked scared.

It wasn’t even watching its son. Kitty was saying something, garbled by the marshmallow suit, and the child was still screaming himself to hell and back, but the creature’s sharp eyes had settled on Sheila and never moved. It never moved. Something had blanked out in its core, a black hole eating away at it from within.

Leeland’s screams pulled at Jono with equal force, a telepathic alarm blaring on every level, another part of the undertow nipping at his heels. His chest burned. Not like before. Not like _that._

Ten meters between Sheila and the creature. 

Five. 

Two. 

_“Leeland!”_

Out of nowhere, Cy crashed into his mother in a rugby tackle. He shouldered Leeland out of her arms, holding the panicked child with one arm as he deftly pushed himself back off the ground and shot off into the fields. Sheila reached out for support. The creature had reached back on instinct only to freeze inches away from her, still as statue and stalagmite. She fell hard, palms skimming the gravel, trying to wave Kitty off even as her eyes never left the creature, locked there by some untransmissible understanding.

“Leeland!” Sam’s voice this time, rough with desperation. He blasted off after them, Magneto hot on his heels.

By the time Jono reached Sheila’s side, the woman had accepted Kitty’s arm and risen on unstable feet. Her hands were bleeding. Xi’an brought water and a towel. 

“We brought a neutralization field,” Xi’an explained as she worked. Everyone else was still frozen, Sheila’s gaze now fixed on Jono and Kitty’s on the creature. “They can’t port away. We’ll get them this time. It’s going to be okay.”

The field was what Jono had been feeling, that molasses dimming the child’s light. Yet it wasn’t the only thing. 

**“Something’s wrong.”** Kitty sounded distressed even in monotone.

“No shit,” Jono snapped, and Sheila barked a laugh verging on hysteria.

Kitty ignored him. **Go.”**

The creature blurred across the field, a lithe stroke of calligraphy on the landscape that was all too familiar. Back at the county fair, that monster in the shadows had been Leeland’s other parent. It really was an eldritch custody case all along.

Kitty turned back to Sheila, face twisted in apology behind the glass. **“Mrs. Ramsey, I—”**

“Go,” Sheila roared in answer, and Kitty took off like a schoolgirl late for the bell.

Jono ran.

Everything burned – his chest, his lungs, the fractured leg he tried to pay no mind to, and a frantic alarm in the back of his head, a psychic headache bleeding into his fingertips. A fever, he thought without care. An infection eating away at him. 

Priorities.

They’d cornered Cy in one of the meadows, ringing him like a round theater the size of a football stadium. Sam and Magneto had overtaken him, cutting him off from up ahead. The rest of the New Mutants spread themselves around to cover each direction. Cy couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t fight them. The baby kept screaming, though now it clung to its father instead of struggling for freedom.

Jono reached the circle just as the creature landed in its center. It melted back into its fragmented, angular form, crowned with a full head of wildgrass. Advancing the same way as animal control on a vicious dog, it inched forward with hands low, arms out to either side.

“Selfsoulfriend—”

Stolen words, that’s what Jono thought he’d hear, but the voice trilled like nothing of their world, birdsong harvested and spun into silk.

“Please, _please,_ why do you run? Self is so sorry. Self could not—”

Cy turned himself, angling the shoulder with Leeland away from the creature. He reminded Jono of a fencer, making the target of his torso as small as possible, even without a weapon. Yet even from a distance, Cy’s eyes were dark with violence. He would rend the limbs from the alien with his bare hands if need be.

Leeland raised a little hand to his father’s cheek, and Jono knew what they were going to do.

“You have to separate them,” he hollered across the field. Paige was right, he didn’t know anything about the situation, but neither did the X-Men. “He didn’t kidnap Leeland, it’s the other way round.”

Dani was closest, near enough that he could see the light of realization come on. “Warlock, stand down!”

They’d named the creature after a master of the dark arts. Christ.

Warlock stopped his approach, though it seemed to take all his willpower to do so. Every inch of him was longing, thrumming across the field.

“You think Leeland took him?” Dani asked, jogging over.

“They recognize each other. The kid’s been powering him this whole time.” Until today, Jono didn’t add. “Leeland’s the juice, Cy’s the schematics.”

She gave a curt nod and called orders into her earpiece. Most of the team took a few steps back, and Tabby rolled a few timebomb sparklers into the field. Leeland watched them transfixed, his golden eyes no longer fixated on his father.

“Self did not come for Selfkin.” Warlock clasped his hands behind his back in a show of good faith, as if it mattered when every molecule of him was weaponized. They had no damn idea how to run hostage negotiations. 

“Self only came for you.”

It was the worst thing he could possibly say.

Tears slipped from the corners of Cy’s eyes, black with the soot from his marrow. His face twisted into something far beyond fear—acceptance of a nightmare so long in coming that there were no words left to scream. His hands shook where he’d clenched them in Leeland’s clothes. Hours earlier he gave himself over to death without batting an eye. Now he awaited something even worse.

Jono couldn’t let him face it alone. Ignoring Dani’s shouts, he dragged himself into the field and gave Warlock a wide berth. When he reached Cy, he stood on the side closest to Leeland.

“It’s okay, Cy. They’re okay. They’re your friends. Everyone is here to help.” Cy flinched when Jono reached out to touch his shoulder, then allowed it. “I need you to trust me. Shouldn’t be hard, you’re good at that.” Better than anyone else had been, since Angelo at least.

Cy was still crying when he glanced at Jono. It wasn’t enough. Whatever this was, it was out of Jono’s hands. Probably always had been.

“Will you let me hold Leeland?” he asked, and Cy handed his son over easy as anything. Leeland went silent, eyes blank and gold, and relaxed into Jono’s arms. That was all it took to break the link. 

Cy tugged Jono behind him and he went gladly, carrying the kid towards Sam. While Leeland wouldn’t budge from Jono’s arms, finally having him close was enough for Sam, who sagged out of a battle position.

Now it was only Warlock and a petrified Cy on the field. Warlock watched him and didn’t move.

“You died,” the alien said at last. Gold glimmered in every crack of him. “And Self followed. Over and over Self followed. Wearing different faces. Speaking different words. Walking different planets. Self followed and…nothing.”

This wasn’t something he was meant to see. Jono turned his face towards Leeland and tried not to listen, though the words wrote themselves in him just the same.

“Until this. Until now. But you run. You do not even see Self. You see a monster and—” The song broke, the alien’s face twisted towards the ground. “You break me. I love you and you see only nightmares.”

Kitty jolted on the sidelines, a hand whipping up to smack the forehead of her helmet. She waved her hands for attention, and though Warlock didn’t turn, enough of him perked up to show he was listening.

**“It _is_ a nightmare. Remember his diary? Those last two months, all he dreamed of was you as his siredam!”**

The tense silence of the field broke, replaced by a mournful recognition rolling from heart to heart. Jono didn’t get it. What could make this otherworldly shifter any more threatening?

The ink rolled from Warlock’s surface, swirling beneath a new sheen of warm amber. No more the wildgrass and coral of disjointed limb—he stood humanoid and gold. He reached towards Cy’s face, pleading.

“Selfsoulfriend, Self did not make you Technarch. You made me human.”

Cy froze, eyes tracking the alien’s movements.

_Trust him,_ Jono thought desperately. There was no other way forward. 

“You are so human. You battle siredams even now. You are so brave, and Self is so, so proud of you.”

He held out a hand, palm up. 

Cy didn’t look like a wild ruffian anymore, just a lost little boy, overwhelmed and pushed to breaking. He backed away from Warlock and lost his footing, pitching backwards to crawl in the dirt. Warlock loomed and wavered like the leaves in the breeze. He wouldn’t bridge the distance by force.

_Trust him._

“Go away,” Cy sobbed in a cracking voice, and all at once he wasn’t Cy anymore. He was just Doug, a person Jono didn’t know, a stranger with a voice like broken glass. “I can’t, I can’t.”

Ink pooled in his eyes, painting his skin like watercolor, and he gasped for breath that didn’t come. His hand leapt to his throat as though it had been cut, all his words bleeding free. They’d dragged him from one nightmare to the next, all across the country. 

Leeland turned his face against Jono’s neck and slept. 

“Not right, I’m not right, you have to—” He shook all over, clawing at his throat. The tar wouldn’t come out. The words wouldn’t spin right. Selene had pulled him into a world so very different, and he couldn’t say if she had planted anything within him. 

Warlock curled up in front of him, his smile so soft. “You are perfect to Self.”

Doug took his hand.

It all came to an end with a simple slump. Doug’s eyes slid closed, he sagged into Warlock’s arms, and all was still. 

Hours or years later, Dani touched his back, and Jono nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn’t heard anyone approach. “Come on. Bring Leeland inside. It’s time we all finally talk.”

“Missing someone, aren’t we?” He nodded to the pair in the field. 

“They’ll…follow when they’re ready. Come on.” Dani shook her head at them all and headed off towards the farmhouse. 

Jono followed, but every few steps he glanced back over his shoulder. Deep in slumber, Leeland still nodded his head along to a distant rhythm. Jono heard it too. It wove itself through his head like ambrosia wine, heady and warm, with a refrain of such enraptured devotion that Jono couldn’t think straight. _Alien,_ he thought. Something that effortlessly bright had to be. 

The last glimpse he got was of Warlock curled around his mate, head bowed in adoration to kiss at golden hair, and all the world spread before them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not pictured: the 100 voicemails left on Josh's phone in various flavors of  
> "hey kid we have a problem--"  
> "how quick can you get here"  
> "i think i broke my hand on Warlock's titanium jaw"  
> "nbd but we can't get my arm back in the socket right"  
> "so we picked up some kid without a face in limbo, is that fixable"  
> "IS THE BABY'S DEVELOPMENT STILL ON TRACK, JOSH"  
> "are you on your way yet!!!"  
> "i may have clipped berto's ear when shaving his hideous face, can you fix that, i'm father fond of his hideous face"  
> "bring ALL the vaccines, who knows what the baby picked up!!"
> 
> Casually closes his textbook, leaves his phone on the desk, and strolls off to grab dinner at the cafeteria with his friends.


End file.
